


Disclosure

by klubin (sidonay)



Series: Disclosure [1]
Category: Veep
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Journalism, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, Mild Language, Minor Injuries, Minor Violence, Original Character(s), Thriller
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 10:15:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 73,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4300908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/klubin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's never dealt with this type of story before and he doubts there were many other people out there who have. Politics and government-types slipping and sliding in fields of goose crap as he stands on the sidelines and takes notes on every twist and turn is what he was supposed to be doing, writing sprawling essays on the current political climate as he simultaneously exposes wrongdoings that were worthy of their intellectual audience. That's what he does. This is medicine possibly gone awry and a monster caught on a shaky cell phone camera. This was something that didn't directly involve the words 'conspiracy' and 'aliens', but might as well have. They were in way over their heads, driving directly towards a 'Danger: Bridge Out' sign and choosing to ignore it because what might be on the other side was far more interesting than the very real possibility that they might not make the gap and wind up plummeting to their deaths into the icy, rocky water below.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Disclosure

**Author's Note:**

> So near the beginning of May I made a post with a possible idea and I honestly wasn’t going to do anything with it but a few people seemed into the idea so I figured I’d give it a shot and well… here we are. This story kind of turned out wildly different than when I originally talked about it (isn’t that how things usually happen though?) but we’ll blame that on the intense science fiction mood I was suddenly in while in the middle of writing this. All I can say about the length of this is… it’s insane. I’ve never written anything this long before. 
> 
> Dan and Jonah were supposed to be the main characters of this fic (and they still are) but I can’t have those two without Amy so she wound up being way more involved in the story than I had planned. This was also supposed to be a ship thing with Dan and Jonah and that… didn’t happen either. It’s more of an OT3 thing in the end, if you really want to put a ship in there. Sorry about that. I did my best to mention a decent amount of the other major characters from the show at least once.
> 
> To all the people on 8tracks whose mixes helped to keep me writing (all here in [this collection](http://8tracks.com/trippingbackwards/collections/disclosure)): You don’t know me and I don’t know you but thanks! And to all my followers on tumblr: thanks for putting up with my constant posting about this, especially since most of those posts were me just continually talking about how I couldn’t believe how long this ridiculous thing wound up getting.
> 
> And finally, as a general FYI: The second chapter is just a lot more of my pointless rambling and some fun extra stuff. Possible spoilers so you should probably wait until you finish the fic before you check it out.

Dan Egan does not believe in reincarnation.

Six years ago, when he didn't have any say in who or what he wrote about, he sat in his scratchy walled cubicle at ten in the evening to have a phone interview with a woman in Anchorage, Alaska who claimed (after an intense session of regression therapy) to be the reincarnated soul of Balto, the Siberian husky sled dog. She spoke with a thin voice, her tone questioning with a soft accent that he'd never been able to place and everything she told him was the cream scraped off the surface of an animated film that had been released in the mid-nineties. There was a sincerity when she explained herself to him, when she answered his questions, and it had, at first, sounded incredibly amusing to the point where he had to disguise his laughter as a particularly lingering cough from a bad cold but snowballed into a shameful sort of pity. Dan never cared much about anybody but himself, but he seriously considered for one brief moment of stopping her to ask if she was getting any significant help. But then, of course, she said something about “dreams where I wake up barking” that snapped him back into his office in his reality and he had to blame his choked laughter on an awkward sip of water he didn't even have on his desk.

When it was all over, Dan decided that reincarnation couldn't possibly be real because he refused to believe that whatever omnipotent being was up there (his mother would like him to accept that it's God, singular and judgmental and always watching) would allow such a noble animal as Balto to come back into this world in such a truly stupid woman.

Dan Egan does not believe in reincarnation but, after everything he's already been through and as he sits there in a windowless room with a headache and burns on his neck thanks to a particularly forceful jab with a stun gun, nothing but a large, empty table in front of him, he was starting to think he might have been wrong because he must have surely done something horrible in a past life to deserve this specific brand of hell.

 

& & &

_Four Days Earlier_

Here's what Dan knows: He's managed to work his way from the bottom of the sludge pits of shitty journalism to nail himself a spot working for _The Leviathan_ , where he has his own desk and the chance to pick and choose what he wants to write. People with important names ask for him specifically and other people know that if Dan Egan is writing about you, you better hope you fucking cured cancer in the past couple hours because otherwise you were about to get presented on a critical platter made of the fine china with an apple stuffed firmly in your mouth. That is, of course, what Dan tells himself every morning and if you tell yourself something enough times, it starts to become truth. He gets along well enough with his co-workers, gets along better with Amy Brookheimer, and hates everybody else.

Here's what he doesn't know: Why Jonah Ryan seems to follow him around like a puppy he leaves behind whenever he moves apartments and who somehow manages to find him again every damn time. He's relatively sure that it's some sort of twisted coincidence, really, the guy isn't even following him on twitter (unless he was that guy with the egg icon called WhiteHouz26 who continually snarked at every tweet Dan lazily typed out when he remembered he had an account in the first place but he'd never been able to confirm it), but it certainly felt like it was a few more 'accidental run-ins' away from becoming a Lifetime Movie of the Week (Stalked by Bigfoot: The Dan Egan Story).

Jonah ran and wrote for a website called _Ryantology.com_ that had popped up on the internet like a particularly invasive fungus three years ago and, for the first few months, people had a difficult time figuring out if it was satire or if this possibly unmedicated man with his high school newspaper sort of writing and occasional shouting in heavily edited ten minute videos was one-hundred percent real. One week he would be reporting on the latest celebrity scandal with flashy headlines and just-on-the-edge-of-being-paparazzi-sleazy photos and the next would be a flashy headline and a somber article about the possible corruption in Governor Lombardi's office that concluded with a surprise fifteen minute video of Jonah reenacting with homemade dolls some apparently illegally recorded tapes. Because nobody could prove that Jonah actually had them, he was never in any serious trouble but it was talked about for at least two weeks. Meanwhile, Dan wrote a scathing but heavily researched and comprehensive essay about the same exact thing and, while his peers had applauded him, the rest of the world could talk about nothing except Jonah fucking Ryan. It was safe to say that Dan, to put it as childishly as possible, hated his guts and hoped that he tripped and fell down an open manhole.

\- -

Dan is sitting at his table in the coffee shop (in the seat facing the window because he never liked having his back to doors or any sort of surface where people can see him but he couldn't see them) that he went now and then when he felt like he could tolerate the atmosphere when he gets a text from a source he's used on more than one occasion.

_You remember Governor Lombardi? Apparently the guy has gotten himself into some serious shit._

_What kind of serious shit?_ Dan texts back, elbow resting on the wooden table and he glances at the condensation rolling down his glass of water before focusing back on his phone, glaring at the screen until he got a response.

 _The kind that I can't spell out in a text,_ it says and Dan grits his teeth, drums fingers on the table, taps his thumb against the keyboard as he thinks. This guy wasn't his favorite sort of person to meet face-to-face (he treated this whole “confidential source” thing a little too seriously, had them meet on shadowy corners or dingy bars, switched phones every month just in case somebody might figure him out, had Dan use a codename on his contacts list) but Lombardi getting himself into the sort of shit that couldn't be typed out in a few words over the phone was worth having to suck down a few light beers and eat a handful of stale, salty peanuts. Then again, he could just be over-exaggerating it and simply wanted to meet in person because he had expressed on more than one occasion that he hated texting and never quite got the handle of it.

Dan swipes out of the conversation window, brings up his browser and starts searching, puts in Lombardi's name, follows it up with as many buzzwords as he can come up with while people talk and laugh and rattle dishes and metal utensils around him, but all he comes up with are worn out articles re-hashing what did or did not happen last year or follow-up interviews with staff members. The third hit was a link to Jonah's website and Dan clicked on it, scrolled through but there was nothing new there either (he would know, he checked _Ryantology.com_ every single night if only to satisfy his intense desire for schadenfreude, like watching some poor guy get nailed in the nuts with a baseball bat swung carelessly by his three-year-old son or, at least, that's what he liked to tell himself).

A politician swimming in excrement and he's one of the first people to know about it?

_Where are you right now?_

__\- -_ _

The beer and peanuts give him the hiccups, the layers of carbonation winning over whatever bitter taste had been in the bottle and he can still feel them in his nose and his chest (or maybe that was just heartburn he was too young to be experiencing) and it's like the middle-aged bartender decided to just piss in his bottle and then water it down with a little soda water because who would ever be able to tell the difference? Mike looks just as disheveled and frazzled as he always does, like he stuck his finger in an electrical socket and decided that he could make the look work.

“We couldn't have just met in a park or something? Jesus, I feel like I'm going to walk out of here and have to go straight to an urgent care clinic,” Dan says, scratches his arm, kicks his stool with his heel. Mike slouches.

“It's not that bad,” Mike says.

“It's not that bad,” Dan repeats mockingly and then frowns when Mike stands up, asks him if he wanted this information or not because he could probably find a whole bunch of other lesser journalists who would absolutely love to have this. “Shut up, Mike,” Dan says. “Sit down.” He actually does sit back down which is pretty remarkable and also sort of sad. “Now is this some grapevine sort of shit or did you witness what you're about to tell me first-hand?”

“I didn't experience it first-hand, Jesus Christ,” Mike laughs, “I wasn't in the goddamn room when he was banging her.”

“Banging who? Is this just an affair thing because—and I can't believe I have to remind you—I write for _The Leviathan_ , not _The Lowlife Gazette_.” 'Not Ryantology.com' is what he wanted to say but there's also a weird part of him that wants to believe that not even Jonah Ryan would publish drivel like a low tier politician having sex with a woman he wasn't married to. Affairs these days were a dime-a-fucking-dozen and the first person to get their grubby hands on those kinds of stories are also the people who write articles for magazines with covers with photos of barely obese celebrities with their faces censored and a headline that reads “Which Celebrity Let Themselves Go!” with a few “Over 500 Pounds!” and “Oh No!”s scattered around in red text for good measure.

“Not just an affair thing,” Mike says, moves his stool closer like he thinks anybody in the bar in the middle of the afternoon might actually give a shit about what they were talking about. “Bigger. Bigger-ish.”

“Lombardi? We're still talking about Lombardi here, right?” The possible corruption case that he had written about and that Jonah Ryan had his dolls act out had been something that had gone unproven and had left many shrugging and pushing anything that had been dug up by people like Dan under a heavy rug that they stapled to the floor so nobody could ever put in the effort of taking another peek. It was assumed that it was nothing but something cooked up by his rivals or maybe a minor infraction taken way out of proportion and the so-called tapes that Jonah Ryan claimed to have had were never found, no matter how long he was interrogated for to get him to spill (Dan only knows that because the last time they had run into each other, Jonah wouldn't shut up about being a “person of interest” and how he was sure it would be on his Wikipedia page by the morning).

“Yes,” Mike says and then nothing else.

“Don't fucking do that. Don't tease me like you're trying to pick me up and take me back to your trash apartment.”

“I live in a very nice apartment, thank you very much. Probably worth more than yours.”

“You work for the government. I highly doubt that,” Dan snorts, taps his empty bottle slowly against the counter. “Do you actually have anything for me to look at here or is this another one of those 'trust me, I'm telling the truth' situations.”

“I've never lied to you, Dan,” Mike says. “But yes, I have something.” He's reaching down to a bag that Dan hadn't noticed was at his feet and he pulls a beige file folder out with what only seems to be a few pages tucked inside. He holds it close to himself like he expects someone to grab it and then leans over, attempts to shove it underneath Dan's jacket to hide it from non-existent wandering eyes but Dan slaps him away and yanks the folder from his tight grip but when he tries to open it, Mike holds his hands down.

“Don't touch me,” Dan says and Mike pulls away as if he'd been burned but Dan doesn't open the folder, waits and stares and Mike shovels a handful of peanuts in his mouth.

“Look at that at home or in a dumpster, I don't care. Just not while I'm around. I gotta go. Don't call me again,” Mike says, standing up again and brushing salt off on his pants.

“You called me, asshole, remember,” Dan replies. “But, you know, thanks for this.”

“You read that, you'll be doing more than thanking me,” Mike says.

“Gross,” Dan says. He watches Mike amble away, waits until the door is completely closed behind him and then turns in his seat, opening the folder and spreading the photocopied documents inside out in front of him. He only gives them a brief once-over at first, figures he could go through them more thoroughly later, but what he sees has him considering running after Mike to grab him by the face and plant a disgusting wet one right on his mustachioed mouth.

\- -

The receipt from what seems to be a gas station looks like somebody dropped a cup of water on it or had found it buried in the bottom of the same trash can that other people's unfinished and overpriced lunches were thrown into and the receipt for the Rockport Diner with the coffee-stained post-it with Mike's serial-killer-esque smudged handwriting was telling him to go there and ask for Caitlin and Jesus fuck, he wasn't a goddamn private investigator no matter how often journalists liked to pretend that they were. The biggest piece of paper was a crappily photocopied letter that had seemingly been typed out on official stationary and the only words he can make out are “restraining order” and “distraught” and “the father”, which honestly has his mouth salivating because affairs were one thing but an illegitimate child was something entirely different, especially when it was with a Governor who had been accused of spending money that didn't belong to him.

“The jackass wrote the letter on official stationary,” Dan laughs to himself at his desk in his apartment, a single light turned on, and he shakes his head, holds the paper closer to his face as if that might make it easier to read but it doesn't and he sighs. This was better than he could have hoped Mike might try to give him when they met up that afternoon but, now that he's had a chance to look over what was slapped into his waiting hands, he's staring to get that squirmy, creeping feeling up his spine that he gets whenever he realizes that he's going to have to put a lot of work into something that may not give him the most satisfying payoff in the end.

It had happened with Lombardi once before and there was that incident three years ago with Congresswoman Meyer that had left Dan having to deal with possibly being fired for doing what he thought was his job, trying to dig through rough soil with a goddamn snow shovel. The whole situation still made his skin crawl, especially whenever he saw her on television, which was more often than not these days since she was being groomed to possibly take the Vice President spot for next year's election and every single news channel wanted to talk to her, ask her questions and listen to her being robotically charming and falsely coy.

She was there again, he could hear her behind him from the TV that he had put on as sort of ambient noise because he couldn't stand sitting around in silence and music was too distracting and he frowns, jaw clenching as he stands, bare feet cold against the polished wood floor, and changes the channel, flicks through until he finds something with a heavily accented British man narrating the scene of a pack of hyenas looking for their next meal.

Dan exhales slowly through his nose and glances back at the thin spread of paper on his glass-topped desk, his laptop closed and pushed off to the side, his phone on but mysteriously quiet and he focuses on the crumpled post-it note, figuring it had been awhile since he'd gone out somewhere new for breakfast and he could really use a nice egg white omelette.

\- -

It's six in the morning and Jonah Ryan is sitting in the Rockport Diner, a steaming cup of coffee in a thick, white mug in front of him as his frame towers over the top of the cracked red leather booth, his knees bunched under the table, fingers tapping in an unknown rhythm as he very obviously made himself look as if he didn't belong.

Dan very nearly turned and walked right back out the way that he came except the bell attached by an old dirty piece of string to the hinge jingled abrasively and a woman with slicked back dirty blonde hair had noticed him from behind the counter and was already waddling his way, a menu clutched in between her long red talons.

“Anywhere you want, honey,” she says, hands him the menu which is worryingly sticky and Dan plasters on the best fake smile he can manage and blinks slowly at her, pointing towards where Jonah—who must have noticed him by now—was still sitting.

“I'm actually meeting a friend,” he says. She stares at him and she might as well have shrugged for all she cared and he considers asking her her name but he doesn't want to play his cards this soon in the game (and also, maybe, he wants to assume that Lombardi wouldn't possibly father a child he'd deny fathering in the first place with a woman who looked like this). Instead he nods and walks slowly over towards Jonah, clears his throat. Jonah stares, large mouth agape for a moment but when Dan waves with artificial friendliness, he frowns.

Dan slides easily into the seat across from him and leans forward, plastic grin still pulled painfully on his face, hands palm-down on the table.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Dan asks through clenched teeth.

“Normally I'd love to share with you, Egan,” Jonah says, calls Dan by his last name because he thinks that's cooler, thinks that it makes him more interesting, “But not this time. I've got something good cooking and you're not getting a goddamn peek in my oven. It's like a soufflé.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“A soufflé. If you open the oven before it's done, it collapses. You've got to—”

“Jesus Christ, Jonah.” Dan puts a hand to his face, closes his eyes and hears footsteps from someone who was at least twenty pounds lighter than the waitress who had approached him when he had shuffled in moments earlier.

“Can I get you anything, sir?” She's talking to him, he knows it, but Dan also doesn't particularly feel like acknowledging her either.

“Just give him a minute,” Jonah is saying to her. “He's a heavy drinker. Very hungover. Thanks, Caitlin,” he says and Dan's head snaps up and he reaches over to grasp tightly around Jonah's wrist. Jonah glances down at the fingers wrapped around him and then looks back up at Dan. “What—”

“Caitlin?”

“Yeah, so what? It's her name.”

“You're going to tell me why you're here or—”

“Or what?” Jonah interrupts his threat, finally pulls his hand away and wrings his wrist in his other hand as if he'd been handcuffed and then occupies his nervous fingers with moving his mug in circles on the tabletop, pausing to point in Dan's face. “You're gonna cause a scene? Like a fucking woman being broken up with? It won't work on me, Egan. I am scene-resistant. Been there, done that. Washes off me like I'm wearing a raincoat.”

“Please stop. Stop.” Dan holds his hands up, puts them flat in the air between them. “You're the one making a scene, Jonah, alright? Just tell me why the fuck you're here, okay. Tell me why you're here.”

“No.”

“Tell me.”

“Fuck you. No.”

“Jonah!”

“Fuck off!”

“Goddammit, Jonah,” Dan says and he hates that he's going to do this, hates that he feels like he has no choice and maybe it was the lack of food and coffee clouding his mind but he reaches into his bag and pulls out the folder that Mike had given him, slapping it down on the table and nudging it towards Jonah, who tentatively pushes up one of the corners with the nail of his index finger and when he sees what's inside, he opens it all the way before pulling an identical folder out of his own beat-up bag and spreading it out underneath Dan's.

He's got the same letter only in marginally better quality, along with a receipt with a pale pink and crisp post-it attached telling him to find 'Caitlin Kirchner'. The handwriting, at least, isn't Mike's so Dan knows that he doesn't have to find him later and wring his pathetic neck for feeding information to Jonah goddamn Ryan but that's the only aspect about this entire situation so far that isn't absolutely awful.

“Who's your source?” They ask each other simultaneously but neither of them offer an answer to each other's question, sit there leaning forward, eyes narrowed as if they were both waiting for the other to suddenly strike out with tight-knuckled fists or a slap across the face.

“Alright, fine,” Dan says, folds his hands in front of him and then untangles his fingers, palms flat on the tabletop. “But you're not pursuing this.”

“I'm sorry, what? What did you just say?” Jonah cups a hand around his ear, turns his head towards Dan. “Because it sounded like you telling me to not go after this story,” he says, drops his hand and twists his body back to a forward-facing position. “Which is funny because I'm pretty sure I never made you the boss of me at any point in the past few weeks so...”

“I don't know if you've noticed, Jonah, but I work for a legitimate magazine. You know, an actual well-respected one? One that intellectuals with an above average collection of brain cells reads every morning before going to work. You do know what those are, right? They don't have flashy videos or emojis in them so maybe not.”

“Oh, well, excuse me, Mister Fancy-Fucking-Pants over here,” Jonah says, waving his hands in the air. “I am just as legit as you are, Egan. You don't own this story. There is no dibs in journalism.”

“There should be,” Dan says, sits back finally with a lengthy exhale. He hates to admit it—never would out loud not even if somebody was holding a well-oiled gun to the side of his head—but Jonah is right. They could hit the dirty tennis ball back and forth for hours but it wouldn't matter in the end because the only way he would be able to stop Jonah from running with this would be to feed him something just as good (which he definitely doesn't have) or kill him. The truth was, as much as Dan saw himself as a highly respected writer of such a prestigious paper, he also knew that Jonah was far more popular than he was pleased to even acknowledge and, no matter how badly written or sensational his style, it was a distinct possibility that Jonah Ryan might attract slightly more impressive fish with a shorter rod, just because he knows what's the best kind of bait.

So no murder, no other story, and no allowing Jonah to gather up his folder and gallop off into the horizon. What Dan decides to say next is already giving him stomach pains and he swallows it down, curls his fingers around air and then reaches over to pick at the corner of his own folder which was still open in front of Jonah, who was currently stirring a third packet of brown sugar granules into his now lukewarm coffee.

“We'll work on it together,” Dan says, watches as Jonah pauses, his spoon still clutched in between his fingers, his head snapping up.

“What?”

“Together. You and I... I mean, don't piss yourself or anything, I'm not sharing a byline with you.”

“I wouldn't want to share one with you anyway,” Jonah says, with a look on his face that showed Dan that he was a truly horrendous liar. “Why would you want to help me?” He sounds suspicious and Dan doesn't blame him. He's spent so long doing anything he could to try and distance himself from this obnoxious giant of a man that his sudden willingness to cooperate over something that could make either of their careers was definitely toeing the line into Sabotage Territory. It's a good question, too; one that Dan is currently struggling to come up with a decent answer for right at that moment. He doesn't want to help Jonah, just as he doesn't particularly want (or need) Jonah to help him. As far as heads on a totem pole go, Dan is somewhere near the top and Jonah is a snarling face squished near the bottom and the only thing he seems to be good for is letting others stand on his impossible tall shoulders. He can't say that, of course.

“I wouldn't be helping you,” Dan says with a laugh that he didn't mean to let out. “We'd be, you know,” he moves his hand back and forth between them, “Helping each other. Sharing information.”

“But why?” Jonah pressures and, once again, he's unfortunately right. Dan didn't necessarily answer his question.

“Okay, look... We don't stick together on this one, we'll just keep running into each other everywhere we go. I get to some guy first, get my info and then you show up and get nothing because suddenly he's not talking to another journalist. Vice versa with me. And then what? Then neither of us get the whole picture and this story either gets buried for no one to find or we publish what gets defined as libel and speculation and we both go to jail.”

“They don't have criminal defamation laws in this state,” Jonah says, “But I see your point.” He sits back, gaze flickering to the folders, to Dan and then quickly to where Caitlin was wiping down the counter. “You won't fuck me over once this is all finished?”

“No. Will you?”

“I don't plan on it,” Jonah says, lifting his arm and holding out his hand towards Dan, who stares down at it for a few seconds before realizing what Jonah wants from him and he considers protesting but, instead, he grudgingly reaches out and shakes his hand. “So now what,” Jonah asks almost excitedly, “We corner her, make her talk?”

“For fuck's sake, we're not mob enforcers. Is that how you usually do things? Just back people into corners with your monstrous frame and badger them until they tell you something?”

“Not usually,” Jonah says, frowning, and Dan turns to her, waves his hand until she notices and, as she starts walking over, he remembers the papers scattered on their table, turns and begins hurriedly stuffing them all together into a disorganized pile and Jonah takes over, crumpling them as he pushes everything into a single folder and then shoves it all under his thigh. It's highly unlikely that Caitlin didn't witness their mad scramble but, if she did, she doesn't mention it.

“Hi,” Dan says, plasters on the best charming smile he can muster, the one he uses at work functions and for exact situations such as this one. “Caitlin was it?” He doesn't wait for her to respond. “Can I get a coffee?”

“Sure. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Jonah says, leans his elbow on the table, scoots closer to where she's standing, “Does the name Joseph Lombardi mean anything to you?” The last time Dan has seen someone go so red so fast was when he was celebrating Andrew Doyle's (who had been the head of the crime desk for over fifty years) retirement and the man in question had a heart attack right in the middle of cutting the first slice from his sheet cake.

“Just... Just a coffee then?” Caitlin stammers, clears her throat and leaves stiffly, walking behind the counter and pausing for a moment before pulling down a clean mug and, when she turns her back to the pair for a brief minute to pour the steaming dark liquid, Dan faces Jonah and sends a swift and completely childish kick to his shin.

“Ow, shit, what the hell, Egan?” He bends slightly, hand going under the table to rub at his leg and Dan is clenching his teeth so tightly that he's either going to shatter them or, at the very least, give himself a bad headache in a few hours.

“First of all, quit calling me 'Egan'. It sounds ridiculous. And second: What the fuck was that?”

“Did you see the look on her face?” Jonah asks, as if Dan wasn't currently in the middle of reprimanding him. “Ask anybody else in here who Lombardi is and they'd shrug. 'The Governor, right?' She looked like a fucking tomato.” Dan opens his mouth to reply, to tell him that, yeah he noticed that, too and he's right, the average citizen wouldn't look like that if you asked them if they recognized the name of their Governor but if you're trying to get someone comfortable, to get them to spill the goddamn beans, you don't pick up the can and throw it at their head first, but then Caitlin is coming back and placing the mug in front of Dan with a subtle tremor in her hand.

“I don't know who you are,” she says, “But I want you to drink your coffee and then please leave.” She goes to deal with another table, an elderly man holding a copy of Dan's magazine in front of him, pages almost to the tip of his nose despite the reading glasses perched on his face but Jonah calls out to her, tells her to wait and, surprisingly, she actually does. Jonah's got a look on his face like he wasn't expecting it either and he hesitates, obviously doesn't have anything more up his sleeve and Dan rolls his eyes, shaking his head.

“I apologize on behalf of my...” A pause so pregnant the baby could have popped out right there on the tile floor. “Well, let's just say I apologize. He's a moron. We just want to talk to you. That's all.” Dan hasn't had to deal with getting a member of the general public to speak to him on record about anything in years; he normally dealt with politicians and their spouses and government staff members, all who know how to play the game, are more than willing to talk to a journalist as long as they were in total control of what got published, coded language and buzzwords tumbling easily from their mouths, easy laughter followed by sobering speeches that they hoped would appear as a headline or bold blocky text in between the flow of smaller print. But talking to Mr. or Mrs. Everyman is entirely different: they were nothing but a solid block of emotion, only knew what they saw on fictional television shows where people like Dan or Jonah showed up with microphones and cameras or tape recorders and started harassing them, lobbing questions where every impassioned answer was taken wildly out of context.

Regular people didn't trust journalists. Neither did politicians, but at least those guys knew how to make their contempt work in their favor.

“Talk to me about— How did you find me? How do you know who I am?” She faces them again, walks over just close enough that she can keep her voice low but out of arms length as if she thinks one or both of them might try to kidnap her. Her tone is unreadable, dancing sloppily somewhere between nervous and angry.

“We have reliable sources,” Jonah says and it doesn't sound as smug as Dan thought it would coming out of his mouth.

“Well,” Caitlin says, “Your sources are assholes. I won't tell you anything. I mean, sure, I threatened to make this public if he didn't— I thought if I told him I'd talk to people like you he'd be more likely to— It was just a threat. I didn't mean it.” she says, stops suddenly and almost puts her hand to her mouth like she can't believe she even said that. “No, no,” she's shaking her head, eyes closed, moving her hands like Dan and Jonah had put a secret curse on her, as if they were compelling her against her will to speak. “Please just go. Don't get involved with this, okay? This is all way messier than it seems and I have a kid to look out for, alright?” She jumps again, hands to her face.

“So the kid is definitely his?” Jonah asks without hesitation, just spits it out at her feet.

“Here's your check,” Caitlin says in response, digs around in her apron to produce a pad of paper where she rips off the top on and slams it face down on the table and turns, once again, to walk away.

“What did you mean this is way messier than it seems?” Dan follows up, figures at this point Jonah might actually have the right approach with this woman and, for a second time, she stops in her tracks. “If it's as grimy as you say it is, then you and your kid that may or may not also be Lombardi's kid won't even matter. Blip on the radar.”

“Name changed to protect the innocent type of thing,” Jonah says, jumping in.

“I mean, come on,” Dan says, “I can tell you hate the guy.” He can't actually tell, he's bluffing but he figures that he's got a better chance of being right than he does at being wrong and they watch as she glances at them over her shoulder, silent as she thinks.

“We could nail him to the wall like a damn butterfly in a museum,” Jonah says. “All we need from you is the pin to put him there.” Dan gives Jonah a look because where the heck did that come from but then he returns his attention to Caitlin and she swallows, hands clenching and unclenching and she kicks her heels against the floor. Something changes on her face in that moment, as if she had a truly astounding epiphany and any nerves she had been displaying vanish.

“Eric Nagel,” she says on an exhale, like a huge weight had just been hoisted off of her chest. “But don't say I didn't warn you.”

\- -

They're sitting together in Dan's car even though Jonah's is parked just a few feet away, mostly because he invited himself inside, swinging the passenger side door wide open and sliding onto the cool leather, his bag dumped at his feet. Dan's head is humming, going over the minimal amount of information that they had gotten carefully slipped into their palms (and he hates how both he and Jonah are already referring to themselves as “they” and “their” and “we” and not as the entirely separate entities that they definitely should be), figuring out what he's going to tell his editor because Kent already approved this last night but he's going to want to know that this story might go a bit deeper than he initially thought and that it also might take a bit longer to get off the ground and published for the masses and that all he has is a new name from a woman who might have just said that to get them out of her hair. There were a lot of 'mights' and not enough facts.

“—Never got officially charged,” Jonah is saying, Dan finally realizing that the guy next to him was talking, tuning in just as he finishes his sentence. He's holding his phone up to his face, reading off the small screen and Dan blinks.

“Wait, what?”

“Come on, Dan,” Jonah says, exasperated, uses his thumb to scroll back up to the top of the page. “Eric Nagel, brother of Theodore Nagel, CEO of Nuvarin—”

“Nuvarin? The pharmaceutical company?”

“Right,” Jonah says dismissively. “Two years ago, Theodore Nagel was accused of fraud but, like I said, he was never officially charged.” Dan bites the inside of his mouth and stares out the window, hands on the steering wheel for lack of anywhere else to put them and he's pretty sure he remembers Amy covering that story, remembers listening to her bellyache on a nearly daily basis about how it wasn't going anywhere and that, no matter whom she spoke to, (from Theodore himself to the office building's janitor), all the information was exactly the same: Nobody's sure, the evidence is minimal, it's probably just a disgruntled employee with too much time on their hands. ”You want to see a disgruntled employee?” Amy had said. “Oh, I'll show them what a goddamn disgruntled employee looks like.”

“That's fascinating,” Dan says, “But what the hell does that have to do with Lombardi.”

“What do you say we drive over there and find out,” Jonah suggests and Dan frowns.

“If we're doing this, we're going to do it my way and my way doesn't involve kicking down doors and loudly demanding answers. First things first: we do some research.”

“And then what?” Jonah asks.

“Then we make an appointment.”

“And if they won't give us one? Or, better yet, they give us one but it's for five months from now. We might as well be interviewing him about his wife's prize winning roses for Better Homes and Gardens.”

“Well, Jonah,” Dan says, “That's when we start kicking down doors. Now get the hell out my car.”

\- -

The last thing that Dan wants is for Jonah to know where he lives, let alone what the inside of his apartment looks like, but all of his other options of where they could sit for a few hours while they gathered their thoughts and poked around on the internet were intensely unappealing. The lure of another diner, a cafe, or the library had lost it's appeal the minute he graduated from college (and possibly even before that) and bringing Jonah to the building he worked in, parading him around to his co-workers like he wasn't somehow partly ashamed to be practically partnering-up with him on a story that would never entirely be his own child left a bitter taste in the back of his throat.

Unfortunately, the parking lot of the building where _The Leviathan_ offices were housed was the only familiar place he knew he could safely park for a few minutes and he pulls into his usual spot (unmarked because, while he got preferential treatment inside the building, outside was a free-for-all but, like a classroom with unassigned seating, somehow people just found a way to pick a spot and claim it as their own anyway), watches as Jonah—who had been following him despite the fact that he never actually told him to—pulls into the empty spot that usually belonged to Amy and Dan idly wonders where she was because it definitely wasn't lunchtime yet and he knows for a fact that she has never been late to work once in her entire time as a writer there.

“We're going in there?” Jonah asks with as much false indifference as he can muster, looking up at the building as if he thought that if he stared hard enough he might be able to see through the windows and walls.

“No, we're not going in,” Dan tells him as he stands next to his car, the door still wide open, arms leaning on the roof and Jonah shrugs, shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Whatever. Sure.” Disappointment or annoyance: they both look the same to Dan sometimes. “So what are we doing here? I thought you wanted to do your beloved research.”

“Yeah, just not anywhere I frequent. You live anywhere in particular or do you just work out of a dumpster behind a police station or something?”

“Hilarious,” Jonah says. “I mean, well, you want to go— Not that I don't—”

“Jesus, Jonah, I'm not asking you to fuck me. We just need to place to work.”

“Right. Obviously.”

“That being said,” Dan says, tapping the roof of the car with the palms of his hands, “I actually do need to go my office for a minute. Hang tight.” When he closes his door and turns, he can hear Jonah's feet scuffing against the ground as he mutters something under his breath that's just loud enough that Dan knows he's doing it, but not so any of it is particularly coherent. Dan really does need to go upstairs, needs to fill Kent in on what's changed and has to scrounge around in Amy's desk because he's pretty sure that she still has some bits and pieces from when she had worked on that Nagel piece, but he considers staying there for as long as possible, just to see how long Jonah would stand there and wait for him.

\- -

Jonah's apartment is small and dark and his furniture looks like it's a mixture of shit he's dragged from the curb and pieces that his mother had bought for him for his dorm room and he had decided to just take it with him when he moved to this place a few years ago. A squat coffee table that's been spray painted gold acts as his desk, pulled close to a beat-up couch and the only other technology besides his relatively new laptop is a small television, a video game console, and a video camera that Dan discovers by nearly tripping over it as it's buried under a pile of what he hoped was mostly clean clothes. There's papers everywhere, some with insane scribbles and numbers, many crumpled and a few that appeared to be important documents that Dan would pay good money to sit down and look over for a few minutes (how the hell someone like Jonah Ryan wound up with them was beyond him) and he feels Jonah brush by him, mumble something of an apology for the lack of light, says he was filming and he opens a couple thick curtains to let the grey morning light into the space.

The light makes everything look slightly less depressing but that much more unkempt and Dan thinks about complaining, about poking at Jonah for it but then he remembers that he was the one who asked to come here and that, ultimately, it would be his own damn fault if he found a cockroach in the bottom of his bag tonight when he went home (not that he really believed that those creepy crawlies were even here because the filth seems to be mostly in the form of clothes and papers, neither of which attract bugs and, though Dan loathes to admit it, this isn't exactly a totally shitty part of town).

He dumps his bag on the couch and brushes off the cushion before sitting and then proceeds to lean over and push a couple of heavily stuffed stacks of folders onto the floor and smirks when he hears Jonah cursing.

“Those weren't in any particular order where they?” Dan asks as he pulls out his own laptop and settles it down in the spot he had cleared for himself.

“Go screw yourself,” Jonah says, nudging at the mess with the toes of his shoes. “We didn't have to come here you know. I'm pretty sure you don't live on Mount Olympus, as much as you'd like everybody to believe you do.”

“Whatever you say, buddy.”

“We're not buddies,” Jonah says with the tone of someone just saying what he thinks Dan wants to hear and walks around the coffee table, dumping himself down next to Dan on the couch, pulling his own computer over so they sat side-by-side, screens glowing, and Jonah's desktop is about as cluttered as the rest of his life: files and folders everywhere, labels nonsense strings of letters and numbers and the only two programs currently open were iTunes and a document with huge blocks of text where every other word seemed to have the red squiggle underneath. Jonah notices Dan staring and almost embarrassingly minimizes the window, bringing up a blank document and then tapping on the task-bar to bring up his browser. Dan's own screen was meticulously put together: minimal amounts of folders (that had folders within folders) and clear labels typed in all caps, everything closed until he was sure he needed it and, after a few clicks he, too, brought up a blank document of his own and opened his own browser, the twenty-or-so tabs that had been there when he quit popping up in two different windows.

He rummages in his bag, takes out what Mike had given him as well as what he had borrowed from Amy's office and spreads it out along their keyboards. They're sitting close enough that Dan can hear Jonah breathing and it's unnerving. He scoots over, just an inch or two but it doesn't help; Jonah takes up a remarkable amount of space and he does it even more so now that he's in his own territory and Dan is hit with a sudden overwhelming urge to smack him on the back of the head, just to see how he'd react, just make him realize that he's definitely still the one in charge and he's doing him a favor by allowing him to follow him around like a baby duck. He imagines it, lets the image run a few times in his head but that's as far as he gets and instead takes a deep breath, points to the layout in front of them.

“Caitlin Kirchner. Mistress or one stupid drunken mistake. Either way, most likely the mother of Lombardi's illegitimate kid. Most likely. Lombardi seems to want to deny it,” Dan says, picks up the badly photocopied letter that Mike had given him, the one where it alludes to her being mistaken, that Caitlin had the wrong man and Jonah laughs like Dan is a teenager who just told him that he still believes that Santa is real. “What?”

“Lombardi didn't write that,” Jonah says, still laughing, head shaking but he stops, blinks at Dan, eyes widening with surprise and then a barely contained triumph.

“What do you mean he didn't write this?” Dan asks and Jonah snatches the letter out of his hands and then slides off the couch, resting on his knees while he combs through the cluttered mounds of papers that Dan had cleared away a few minutes earlier, finally coming up for air with another letter, typed on the exact same stationary but in startlingly better condition than the one that Dan had been given. Jonah gives Dan his own paper back and then holds out the clean one, dated August of last year and Dan looks back and forth between them, reads his carefully and then Jonah's, chewing on the inside of his cheek. The differences in the writing style were definitely there but they were subtle enough that somebody not paying attention or had never dealt with correspondence from the guy before wouldn't have even taken a second to notice. What really stuck out like a skinny girl at fat camp though was: “The signatures aren't even the same.”

“Right? And fucking look at this,” Jonah says, leans forward and jabs a finger at the top of Dan's page. It's difficult to see because of how dark it is thanks to the bad copy job but Dan narrows his eyes, frowning. “They spelled the name of the city wrong.”

“No they didn't,” Dan says, gaze flickering to Jonah who looks momentarily flustered.

“It's an 'E' and an 'A', though.”

“It's never been an 'E' and an 'A'. Two 'E's. Have you seriously been spelling it with—”

“Forget it.” Jonah takes back Dan's letter again and Dan wants to remind him that he was pretty sure he had his own damn copy if he wanted to look at it badly enough but he manages to let it go for the time being with a slow breath. “You think Lombardi even knows about the kid?”

“Probably. Who the hell knows. The kid isn't important anymore anyway. That's back burner shit for now. This,” Dan says, pointing at the Nuvarin and Theodore Nagel papers, “Is what we need to look at.”

Theodore and Eric Nagel: two asshole trust fund kids and the sons of Martin Nagel, the previous CEO of the company that used to be called Nagel & Sons Pharmaceuticals, but got quickly rebranded once good ol' Marty retired and left the entire thing in the hands of Theodore in 2004, while Eric went off to play doctor on the opposite side of the country. The business hadn't slipped over onto the shady side of the fence until Theodore took over and, seven years later in 2011, after he had cracked the clay and molded it into something new, he was being investigated for fraud, an investigation that last almost a year and a half and that wound up crashing like a badly made paper airplane. Somewhere during that time, Eric had come home to “stand by his brother's side” and then never left. Funny thing was, Amy had noted, Eric didn't just not leave: he completely disappeared. Any further digging that Amy could have done was blocked off by a brick wall after the investigation came to a grinding halt and Kent had pulled her kicking and screaming to another, more relevant story.

What either of them had to do with Joseph Lombardi and, by extension, Caitlin Kirchner, was a mystery.

“But that,” Dan says, “Is what we're going to try and figure out.”

\- -

There are (possibly surprising to quite a few people) many things that Dan appreciates about his chosen profession and doing research, really digging his fingernails into people's layers of possibly dirty history only to shove his armfuls of evidence back in their smug faces later, is truly the top tier of a very delicious and elaborately decorated cake. Jonah, on the other hand, does not seem to be in agreement if his constantly jiggling knees, yawning and put upon exhales were anything to go by, his fingers tapping against the keyboard as if he's merely pretending to be busy. When Dan finally glances over, he finds Jonah with earbuds that had suddenly appeared jammed in his ears and he's stuck on what appears to be a lengthy Wikipedia article. When Dan picks up the computer, ignoring Jonah's long flailing arms and unbearable protests, he scrolls up to see it's a page titled “People Who Disappeared Mysteriously”.

He gives Jonah a look that he hopes is equal parts angry and disappointed and dumps the computer back in Jonah's lap, listens as he grumbles about Dan making him lose his place, pressing the up and down arrow keys as he searches for where he had left off before Dan intervened.

“You're not even going to try and give me a half-assed excuse? Like 'oh, Eric disappeared so I thought I'd check this article to see if he's on there'? Or are you going to get it over with and just tell me you're bored,” Dan says, hands resting on his lap as he waits but Jonah just grimaces and eventually stops fumbling with the keyboard. “Jonah.” He snaps his fingers in his face, moving his hand back and forth and Jonah swats it away.

“Don't touch my goddamn computer, alright?” Jonah says, finally, picking up one of the earbuds that had been pulled out when Dan had taken the laptop from him, listens for a moment and then clicks something a few times, breathing heavily through his nose.

“Are you even trying? At all?”

“I did try! What the hell do you think I've been doing here for the past two hours.”

“You think you could say that one more time, except maybe put some effort into sounding like you actually mean it?” Dan asks and he sits back, rubbing hands over his face. They'd only been there for two hours but it feels like it's been days. The apartment is stuffy and cramped and the lack of natural light combined with the glow from their screens is making him go cross-eyed. He'd hoped he'd at least have a few solid leads by now but, despite going back to the dregs of the search engine, where rarely a man like him even dared to bother to trudge through even on a good day, the best he'd been able to scrabble together was that Theodore Nagel and Joseph Lombardi had gone to college together. There were a few scattered photos from yearbooks that had been scanned onto an archival website, an article or two from the college paper where their names were mentioned, and there was one other name that popped up, often alongside Nagel and Lombardi's—Ronald Sharman—but anything more was going to require something better than what he was doing now. As for information on Eric, it seemed as if somebody had gone through a lot of effort to wipe any indication of him off the internet, as if they wanted the world to completely forget he existed and remember him as a briefly mentioned name on a Wikipedia page or a few scattered articles by irrelevant writers and, honestly, everybody knows you can't completely trust what you read anyway.

“Look,” Jonah is saying, holding up a piece of paper, which looked to be the letter that he had shown Dan earlier and Dan reaches for it, waits for Jonah to put it in his hand and then brings it towards his face. 'Ronald Sharman' is scribbled in barely legible handwriting and Dan frowns.

“Where the fuck did you find this?”

“None of your goddamn business,” Jonah says, snatching the paper from Dan's fingers, folding it to tuck it underneath his computer. “And I was on that Wikipedia article for a reason, thank you very much.” He presses some buttons on the keyboard and peeks at the paper again, typing slowly, jabbing his index fingers against the keys, and then shifting, pressing against the back of the sofa and shifting so he could show Dan the screen, finger tapping against one of the entries. “Ronald Sharman,” he says, “Missing since 2013. Called his wife to say he was staying at work a little late and then: poof.” Jonah spreads his fingers in the air when he says the last word, stares at Dan with the same sort of self-contented triumph he had plastered on when he told Dan that Lombardi hadn't written the letter that his source had copied for him and Dan has to restrain himself from smacking him across his dumb fucking face. “Didn't you say Eric Nagel was missing, too?” He's speaking softly, with a sort of barely muted excitement and Dan wants to tell him to chill out, that whatever is going through his mind at that exact moment is most likely way more glamorous than the truth, that Eric and Ronald probably just ran off with each other to live a blissful gay life on an island somewhere but, instead, he shakes his head.

“Amy said that, not me.” Speaking of Amy... Dan picks up his phone, glances at the screen while he thinks, flicking through the barrage of missed calls and texts he didn't feel like responding to, news alerts that didn't interest him and email notifications that he could tackle later. She knew more about Theodore and Eric Nagel than he could hope to scrounge together in one day, but asking even a vague sort of question would bring forth her demonic sort of suspicion and, as much as Dan respects her as a college, he doesn't need one more person suckling on this story's teat. The fact that both Kent and Jonah know is already too much. Best case scenario, she'd want to share a byline; worst case scenario she'd make a case that the story should belong to her because she's dealt with the Nagel Family already once before. He can hear her arguments in the back of his head. His only hope is that whatever story she's currently working on is just as good (or better). “I'm gonna call her,” Dan tells Jonah, stands up and goes over to the tiny kitchen area to get some sense of privacy and, to Jonah's credit, he stays on the couch, busies himself on his computer but he doesn't put his earbuds back in and Dan can swear he sees him scoot just a few inches closer, leaning sideways on a propped up elbow.

Amy picks up on the third ring and she doesn't sound particularly pleased that she even had to answer in the first place, but the fact that she'd walk away from whatever she was doing to talk to Dan brings a completely unwanted but unavoidable smile to his face.

“What do you want, Dan?” She asks, voice low as if she's worried she'll be overheard and, in the background, Dan can hear the murmurs and clattering of people in a restaurant. Dan glimpses at the digital clock on Jonah's microwave to see that's it's not quite noon yet.

“Little early for lunch, isn't it?”

“No shit,” she says, letting out a quick breath of air. “It's the only time she would meet me this week.”

“Who's 'she'?” He has to, can't help himself. She'd do it to him, too (and has many times in past).

“Mind your own business,” she snaps.

“Not the first time I've heard that today,” Dan says, leans back against the fridge, crossing his ankles and resting an arm over his chest, hand in the crook of the arm holding the phone to his ear.

“Seriously,” Amy says, “What do you want?”

“How good is the story you're working on right now?”

“That's why you called me?” Amy asks, sounding like if she could reach her fist through the phone to punch him in the nose, she definitely would. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just answer the question. How good is it?” Dan can practically hear her narrowing her eyes.

“Pretty great, actually. Again, I ask: Why?”

“I need to ask you some questions about Theodore and Eric Nagel,” Dan says and Amy laughs, a hearty sort of squawk and he can imagine her throwing her head back, her free hand in the air and she clears her throat as if somebody walking past had caught her and given her a strange sort of look.

“You son of a bitch,” Amy says. “I get it. Yeah, alright. I'll answer your questions, but I can't right now for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is the pure enjoyment I'm going to get out of knowing you're going to have to sit on your hands for however long I feel like making you wait. I should be back at the office in, eh, about an hour, though. Maybe less if I can convince her to have another drink,” she adds on, muttering almost more to herself than to Dan.

“Fine,” he concedes, mostly because he feels as if he doesn't have much of a choice in the matter. “But not at the office.”

“Please don't tell me you're going all paranoid on me, Dan Egan. You promised you'd wait until you were gross and senile before you started to go delusional, like all the good journalists do,” Amy says.

“It's not that,” Dan says and then hesitates. It's highly unlikely she'd be as forthcoming as he needs her to be if she knows in advance that Jonah was going to be tagging along. “Sue's mad at me again,” he lies, figures that's something at least somewhat believable.

“What'd you do this time?”

“Not a clue.”

“Of course,” Amy says, sounding entirely nonplussed. “What's that weird place you usually eat lunch called?”

“Tavola Toscana.”

“Right. That place. One hour.” She hangs up without saying goodbye, which was pretty much normal for her and Dan walks back over to where Jonah was sitting, still looking through the same Wikipedia article he had been glued to when Dan interrupted him a few minutes ago.

“Hey, Frankenstein,” Dan says, waits for Jonah to acknowledge him. “You hungry?”

\- -

There were two things that Amy got wrong about Tavola Toscana: it's not weird and he doesn't usually eat lunch there. He's pretty sure that he's only been there a couple of times but, for some reason, Amy liked to act as if he had a usual table and that the owner knew him by name when the truth was that Dan hadn't been in awhile because he hates waiting any longer than five minutes for a table and he was pretty sure he didn't even know the gender of the person who paid to keep the place running.

When he and Jonah arrive after another hour of thumb-twiddling in Jonah's apartment (time which Dan had spent attempting to decipher a few more pages of Amy's notes (notes he wasn't going to tell her he 'borrowed', unless he was feeling particularly suicidal that afternoon which, thankfully, he wasn't) and Jonah had done whatever the hell it was Jonah did) they appear to have shown up during a lull, because as soon as they walk through the heavy glass doors they're being accosted by a young hostess who asks if it'll just be the two of them with a weird sort of twinkle in her eye (“Oh god, no,” Dan laughs, much to Jonah's startling dismay, “Someone else is coming.”) and then leads the pair of them to a small, round table near the center of the room, laying long, plastic-coated menus in front of them, heels clicking as she walks back to her station.

Dan sits facing the window so he can see her coming and Jonah takes the chair to his right, scooting it slightly closer so he, too, could watch people moving past them more easily. He picks up the menu and starts browsing, a finger trailing under each word but Dan barely glances at his, instead picks up his fork and turns it back and forth, tapping each end against the table as it flips over.

“I'm not paying for anything you order,” Dan says to Jonah.

“I didn't ask you to,” Jonah says. “Believe it or not, I do actually have money. I've been to nicer places than this before. Numerous times.” He spends another few minutes reading the menu over but, by the time their waiter finally makes his way over to him, all he asks for is a glass of white wine. “Whatever you'd recommend,” Jonah tells him, with an air of not caring, but a look on his face as if he honestly knows nothing about wine and risking having to pay fifty dollars for a glass is better than appearing like a fucking idiot in front of Dan which, honestly, has him torn between feeling flattered and completely and utterly amused. Dan gets himself a coffee, tells the waiter that there's a third person coming and that she'd want coffee, too, but then he hesitates, changes his mind.

“Nah, get her a glass a wine. Red. I don't care what it is. Something good.” Dan has never tried to pretend he knew anything extraordinary about fermented grapes. Sure, he knew enough to be able to schmooze when he needed to, when he was having an important conversation with someone who spent afternoons at vineyards smelling large glasses of identical looking wines, saying how they detected hints of oak and oranges and earthworms and he could spout off a few names if he was on a date but, other than that, he was as lost as anybody else. He was pretty sure the people who claimed to be experts didn't know much either and he wouldn't be surprised if they were just making it up as they went along and all the common folk out there felt they were too uncultured to ask questions.

By the time their drinks show up, Dan spots Amy walking past the large window, watches as she pushes her entire body against the doors and marches inside, cutting the hostess off mid-sentence. The girl turns, stands on her toes and then points in the general direction of where Dan and Jonah are sitting and Amy follows her finger, leaning past a heavy-set man who had meandered into her line of sight and she finally sees Dan, nods and puts a hand in the air as a sort of greeting and, clutching her bag tightly to her side as if she thought somebody might try to steal it, she walks straight towards him.

The man must have been blocking Jonah when Amy had been attempting to seek Dan out a few seconds ago because, when she finally reaches the table, she sees that Dan isn't alone and comes to such a sudden halt that Dan could very nearly hear the sound of brakes screeching.

“What the fuck is he doing here?”

“Hey'ya Amy,” Jonah says, smiling up at her and she wrinkles her nose in response.

“You two know each other?” Dan asks and Amy snorts, pulls the empty chair she was standing in front of out, rolls her coat off her shoulders and drapes it over the back before sitting down.

“We've met,” Amy says. “You're not writing a story with this idiot, are you?” She addresses Dan as if Jonah isn't within earshot and Dan shrugs one shoulder.

“It's a long story.” Which means it isn't, he just really doesn't want to talk about it and Amy puts up a hand, allowing it for the time being. She taps the side of her glass with a fingernail and the liquid inside ripples.

“Who's responsible for this?” She asks.

“Figured you could use it,” Dan says and she sighs, picks the glass up by the stem and takes a careful sip.

“You have no idea. I've had two mimosas and enough bacon that I could probably puke up an entire fucking hog,” she says. “I need a goddamn nap.” Her phone, which had somehow ended up on the table during the time she sat down and started drinking, began to buzz and she picks it up, making a noise of frustration and then puts it back down without responding. “She wants to go out again. I think she thought that was a date. I feel kind of sorry for her if she thinks an interrogation is par for the course but look who raised her, right?” She takes another sip and then realizes that neither Dan nor Jonah as any idea who she's talking about and she laughs. “Right. Anyway. Forget I said that. What specifically do you want to know about the Nagel's because, honestly, I don't have the time or the patience to spoon feed you even the CliffsNotes version of their family history.”

“What,” Jonah says, “Is it fucked up or something?”

“No, Jonah,” Amy says, glances at Dan briefly, as if to ask him if he was honestly serious about having this guy here. Why would he do this to her? To himself? Dan shakes his head and she exhales slowly. “As much as we all wish it was fucked up, it's actually boring as shit. Things didn't start getting weird until Teddy took over Nuvarin but, like I said, not getting into it. So come on, spit it out.”

“Did Joseph Lombardi's name ever come up at any point?” Dan asks and Amy considers it for a moment.

“Governor Lombardi? Don't think so.” She looks like she wants to pry as to why he wants to know but she holds it in, pushes it back down her throat with another drink from her glass. “That it?”

“Two other names,” Dan says, sits forward. “Caitlin Kirchner and Ronald Sharman.” Amy leans her elbow on the table and puts a hand to her face, lips pursed as she meditates on what she's been presented with. She picks up her phone and scrolls through it briefly before twisting in her chair to rummage through her purse, bringing out a second, larger phone that she searches through for another couple of minutes. Dan's coffee is getting cold and Jonah has barely touched the glass of wine he had gotten for himself, as if they both had ordered them solely to keep up the image of belonging there and weren't accused of taking up space that could be used by somebody who was actually going to eat.

“Caitlin Kirchner? Nothing. But Ronald Sharman...” She trails off, drums her fingers, the noise muffled by the white tablecloth. “Sounds familiar. What's so special about him?”

“He's missing,” Jonah says immediately. “Just like Eric Nagel. And they knew each other. Theodore and Eric and Ronald. And maybe Lombardi.”

“For crying out loud,” Dan says, putting his face in his hands. On the drive over, the two of them stuffed in Jonah's ridiculously ugly cube-shaped vehicle because Jonah insisted on taking his car, Dan had told Jonah that the less information they feed Amy, the better off they'd all be at the end of the day. Obviously, Jonah either has god awful impulse control or the memory of a goldfish with Alzheimer's.

“Interesting,” Amy says.

“No,” Dan says, first to Jonah and then directed toward Amy. “No it's not.”

“Are you two going amateur detective? You're, what, trying to track Eric Nagel down?”

“Absolutely not,” Dan says at the same time as Jonah says: “Maybe.”

“Uh-huh,” Amy says. “Kent know about any of this?”

“Most of it... Parts of it. Since when did you care if he knows or not?”

“I don't. Just curious. Anyway, it doesn't matter. You won't find him,” Amy says, turns the screen of her phone on to check the time but notices that she has a message and, after reading it over, decides to quickly type back a response whilst continuing to speak to them. “I tried. Even after Kent pulled the story, I still took a couple weeks to snoop around. It's like Eric never even existed. Sure, there's a birth certificate and a couple DUIs on record and a photo or two but it's like one day he was a hotshot doctor and the next you bring up his name to someone who knew him and it's like trying to discuss at a family reunion the uncle who turned out to be a pedophile. Total black sheep.

And as far as Theodore, I should add, because I'm sure you're going to try and get to him at some point: that guy pretty much took himself off the fucking grid after the investigation ended. He wasn’t big into social media so he wasn’t exactly missed there and, from what I hear, he does most of his business shit over the phone or through second parties. Not that I entirely blame him; you’re usually only investigated for fraud when someone else reports you. Doesn’t trust anybody anymore. I can’t even talk to his assistant and that woman was weirdly obsessed with me for awhile.” She puts her phone back down and finishes off what was left in her glass. “This has been a real treat, but I've got more important people I could be talking to right now. I'll get back to you on that Ronald Sharman guy. Everything about that whole fiasco is in my notes and I know I've still got those laying around somewhere,” she says, standing and pulling on her coat.

“He's not in there,” Jonah says. “I'm pretty sure we would've seen his name if it was.” Amy freezes, and Dan can see the sparks flicking in her eyes, like a lighter that's being particularly difficult in getting started.

“Unbelievable,” she says through a clenched jaw. “Un-fucking-believable. Guess what jackasses, you've just lost any and all further opportunities for my help on whatever the hell it is you're working on. Hope you two have just a great goddamn adventure.” She pushes her chair in with barely contained aggression and storms out, practically giving the hostess the finger when she thanks Amy for coming in and tells her to have a nice day.

“Good going, halfwit,” Dan says after he watches her pass by the window, walking in the opposite direction, face buried in her phone and she nearly collides with someone doing the exact same thing. She says something to him and he looks offended but they go their separate ways and she disappears down the rest of the sidewalk. “All you had to do was keep your gaping black hole of a mouth shut during that and we would've been fine.”

“Whatever,” Jonah says, finally lifting his own glass, but still not drinking from it. “We don't really need her, right? The two of us, we've got this on lockdown. A couple of days, we'll have this whole story cracked open like a fucking egg.”

“Oh, a couple of days, huh?” Dan liked to think he was good but he definitely was not that good. Nobody could possibly be delusional enough to believe that they were that good. Well, nobody except for Jonah apparently.

“I say we drive up to Nuvarin right now. Today. Start asking questions until someone gives us some answers.”

“Has that ever actually worked for you before? Because I guarantee you the only times it does are in movies and, I hate to break it to you, but movies aren't exactly real life.”

“Documentaries are,” Jonah says. “But to answer your question, Dan, yes it has worked before.”

“I categorically refuse to believe that, Jonah. I refuse to believe that you just blew into a building like a cow being whipped around in a tornado and actually got somebody to talk to you.”

“Well you better fucking believe it,” Jonah says. “Because I did.” He drains his glass like it's a can of soda and then nearly hacks up a lung after practically inhaling it. “Tastes like shit.”

Their waiter stops by about twenty minutes later and before Dan can ask him to just bring two separate checks, Jonah is asking for a plate of tiramisu, with none of that espresso sifted on top because that's just too damn much and it kind of makes him sick and there better not be any fruit on the plate anywhere because he's fructose intolerant, yes it's real, Dan, stop laughing, it's just very rare.

\- -

Dan eats half of Jonah's tiramisu because he hasn't had much of anything else but he still makes him pay for the whole thing because getting it wasn't his idea in the first place. He sits in the passenger seat of Jonah's stupid car and keeps his nose buried in his phone, doing his best to read up on the history of Nuvarin, jumping from link to link, trying to keep track of bits and pieces of information that might possibly be relevant, figures that he could write it all down by the time they get back to Jonah's apartment (where he doesn't plan on staying because he's been in this guy's company since very early morning and he's not entirely sure he can handle it for too much longer, Jonah being the type of person you can only take in very small doses). He's stuck on a surprisingly in-depth two-year-old article on Business Insider written by some man named Bill Ericsson when they hit a noticeable bump in the road and Dan lifts his head and realizes they had been on the road for a lot longer than they should have been and that all the buildings had turned into trees.

“What the fuck, Jonah. Where the hell are you taking me.” Jonah mumbles in response, keeps both hands on the steering wheel and pointedly faces forward, eyes glaring hard through the windshield at the back of the dirty SUV with a 'Baby On Board' sticker plastered in the rear window. “Excuse me?”

“We're going to Nuvarin!” He says, scratches his thumb against the steering wheel and clears his throat. “I was hoping we'd get there before you noticed.”

“So I said 'no, we're not doing this' and you decided the best decision was to basically kidnap me and go anyway? Is that what's going on here?” Dan watches as the SUV flicks on their turn signal and shifts to the right-hand lane but Jonah doesn't increase his speed. “You drive like an old woman.”

“I drive conscientiously. And I didn't kidnap you. I don't kidnap people,” Jonah says with a strange insistence as if this isn't the first time somebody has accused him of being a criminal. “Sitting around and reading is a waste of time.”

“It's the first day, Jonah. We only got wind of this story this morning, do you remember that? Research is not a waste of goddamn time. A waste of time is going to Nuvarin and getting ourselves put on a 'Don't Allow These People Back in The Building' list. And then what? What if we dig up something serious? Well, too bad, can't talk to ol' Teddy anymore because the second we step one foot through the door there go the alarms and off we go, kicked to the curb.” Dan takes a moment to catch his breath. “Turn this car around.”

“In the middle of the highway?”

“Of course, not in the middle of fucking highway! Find a rest stop, I don't care. Just turn this car around. We're going back.”

“No.”

“...What?”

“We're almost there!” Jonah says, gesturing towards the road out in front of them. “If we're still talking about a waste of time...” He trails off, makes a noise like well, you walked right into that one, my friend and Dan can merely manage to let out an aggravated sort of groan.

\- -

Whatever Dan was expecting, the building they're presented with about twenty minutes later—situated past Exit 145 and right after a tight curve in the road, surrounded by nothing but grass and open spaces, beyond which were only towering trees—is wholly and remarkably unimpressive. Most of the other pharmaceutical companies he's driven by in the past were made up of multiple buildings, the property taking up a large chunk of land but this is only a few stories tall, the bright blue Nuvarin name and logo proudly affixed to the top row of windows, the walls shining, reflective and opaque, the minimal sunlight peeking through the clouds making it gleam and Dan idly wonders how unbearable it must be in full sunshine.

A tall, black steel fence surrounds the property and a single guard station is their only other obstacle from getting into the parking lot and, then, into the Nuvarin building itself. Jonah stops the car on the opposite side of the strangely abandoned road, shutting off the engine and the two of the them stare, waiting, until Dan finally lifts his hands in the air and lets out what he hopes doesn't sound too much like a nervous chuckle.

“Well, Jonah, since you seem to know what you're doing... What now?” Dan is aching to see Jonah fall on his face, to watch him take his bravado and misplaced confidence in his monster hands and inevitably make a fool out of himself just so Dan can tell him that there's a reason he's the one calling all the shots here. Jonah says “Fine” and then “Okay” and he's turning the vehicle back on, reversing carefully so he could easily turn into the entrance to the parking lot and he rolls to a stop right next to the guard station, mouth open with what Dan could only assume was either a truly abysmal lie or the flagrant truth but he stops and frowns instead. “What?” Jonah says nothing and points out his open window and Dan rolls his eyes, unbuckles his seat belt to lean sideways to see the station completely empty.

“That's weird, right?” Jonah asks.

“It's kinda weird,” Dan reluctantly agrees and, without any further hesitation, Jonah takes off his own seat belt and opens his car door to squeeze out and through the window of the deserted station. “Jesus— Jonah don't—” It's not as if he's entirely against the idea itself, Dan knows, it's just that he's one-hundred percent against even the possibility of them getting caught and an area like this is a perfect set-up for hidden cameras. Dan hadn't gotten to the point he currently was in in his career by having physical evidence of some of the more scummy things he'd let himself get away with all in the name of working on a story and he's not about to start letting Jonah get in the way of that near flawless record. But Jonah either doesn't hear him or doesn't listen because there's suddenly a low whistling sound and the gates in front of them slowly pulled wide open and Jonah clambers back into the driver's seat, pausing to turn and grin at Dan.

“Looks like somebody accidentally left the doors unlocked,” Jonah says, still smiling and Dan isn't enjoying this because, if he was, even a little, that would be an utter disaster. Jonah finds a spot right next to an unassuming red sedan with out-of-state license plates and, when they exit the car, Dan's skin feels tingly as if he's just touched a plug that was still sticking part ways out of an outlet and he glances at Jonah but if he felt it as well, he wasn't being forthcoming about it. There's barely any wind and, as they start walking, Dan makes sure that his phone is still on and had, at least, a weak signal and he catches Jonah doing the exact same thing. “Just... you know,” Jonah says. “Making sure.” He comes to a sudden halt, lifts his phone and turns it sideways, tapping the screen and then shielding his eyes to get a better look at the photo he had taken and he apparently finds it suitable for whatever he possibly needed it for and the two of them continue towards the large front doors.

The lobby is air-conditioned despite the cool temperatures outside and it's entirely empty of another human being, save for the woman sitting behind the curved, white desk, a pale faux wooden wall behind her with another Nuvarin logo, just in case you forgot where you were. There was no stale muzak and the smell, much like the decoration, was completely neutral. A winding glass staircase went up behind the wood wall and, behind that, was a row of elevators. The young woman didn't respond to them entering, didn't look up from her computer as if she was sitting inside a soundproof bubble and Dan pats Jonah on the arm.

“Like I said: this was your idea. Go on.” He fails to suppress a smirk as he watches a suddenly apprehensive Jonah walk towards the desk, his hands limp at his sides and Dan eventually follows because he doesn't want to be left out of whatever crashing and burning Jonah was going to be involved in. Jonah bends forward and leans an arm against the top of the desk, rapping his knuckles on the cold surface and the woman finally pays attention, her head snapping up to stare, unblinking with piercing blue eyes.

“Can I help you?”

“I certainly hope so, Miss...” He prompts her, waits for a name but she doesn't give him one, blinks once, twice, red mouth stretched into a thin line. Jonah coughs. “My colleague and I... We're writing a story about Nuvarin and we were thinking that perhaps a tour could be arranged?”

“A story?”

“All good things, I promise,” Jonah says, winking at her but, once again, it garners no response and she flicks her gaze briefly to Dan, who offers her a smile in return but she looks entirely apathetic.

“Who's your editor?” She has the phone, still with a curled cord attached to the end of the receiver, long finger poised over the touchpad, hovering and darting over different numbers like a hummingbird and Dan is ready to tell her, subtly removes his phone from his pocket and prepares to text Kent blindly, tell him to just agree with whatever the nice lady says and he'll explain later but Jonah answers for him instead.

“I'm my own editor. Perhaps you've heard of me? Jonah Ryan? Ryantology dot com,” he says, leans a bit more forward to catch a glimpse of the woman's computer screen as she spins her chair towards it, fingers flying over the keys as she types in the url she was given and they watch as she scans the page in front of her, eyes reading almost too fast, as if she wasn't entirely absorbing the information presented to her.

“And who's he?” She asks, turning back towards them, using her chin to gesture at Dan and Dan falters. The truth could still end with a phone call to Kent, but a lie could get them through the door now but, a few days or months down the road and he's getting sued for misrepresentation and God knows what else the Nuvarin lawyers could possibly throw at him.

“Dan Egan. I'm working with him.” If she recognizes his name, she doesn't acknowledge it.

“Hold on one moment,” she says and picks the phone back up, pressing a series of numbers and the stillness around them is unnerving. She rolls her chair as far away from them as she can get and speaks in a low voice, her free hand clutching the cord, fingers pushing through the curls and it's the first sign Dan has seen that she's an actual human being. The conversation lasts less than thirty seconds and she rolls back over and hangs up, waiting a moment as if she needed to figure out how she wanted to say what she was told. “Wait here. Someone will be right down.” She directs both Dan and Jonah with a flourish towards a backless couch settled against the front windows, a single table with a plant, a box of tissues, and a stack of magazines next to it. They walk over to it, but neither of them sit down.

“If we get escorted out of here by a security guard on a power trip, it's going to be because you winked at her,” Dan says quietly, still feeling like his whispering was echoing throughout the entire space around them. “'All good things, I promise',” Dan repeats in a mocking tone. “'I'm my own editor'.”

“Nah, man. She would've just told us to leave if she didn't want us here. This is a good sign.”

“You're unending optimism,” Dan says, “is astounding.”

“Thank you,” Jonah replies and anything Dan is planning on responding with is interrupted by heavy footsteps descending the staircase behind the woman's desk and a short, barrel-chested man is making his way towards the pair of them, each placement of his foot seeming as if he has to consider carefully where he's going to put it before it touches the ground. His face is entirely unremarkable, as if he was the sort of man who Dan could pass by every single day at work but if someone pulled him aside and asked for description of that specific person, he'd never be able to even explain the shape of his nose. He stops in front of them, arms dangling at his sides and rocks back and forth momentarily on his heels, as if he's attempting to contain some sort of emotion that he knew he wasn't supposed to be showing.

“What's your story about?” He asks without an introduction or pleasantries and Jonah stumbles over his words, spluttering out a garbled sentence void of any actual information until Dan says:

“Emyxril. It's about Emyxril.” The name of the drug had popped up numerous times in recent articles that he had browsed through during the drive to Nuvarin and it was mentioned enough that the word lodged itself somewhere in the back of his head, just waiting to be regurgitated at the right moment. The man turns to look briefly at the woman sitting behind the desk and Jonah takes the opportunity to give a glance down at Dan, who shrugs in return.

“Medical journal?” The man asks them and Jonah laughs.

“God, no.”

“Hm. Alright,” the man says and then holds out his hands in front of him, palms facing upwards. “Please turn your cell phones off and then give them to me. You will leave your bags here. She,” he points to the woman, “Will keep them for you underneath her desk.” He says it all with a bored and practiced lack of effort and then waits, his position unchanging. Neither Dan nor Jonah even so much as twitch a finger and they share a terse moment of silent conversation that only involved the movements of their eyebrows and a slight curve of their mouths. “Your phones will remain in my pocket as I give you the tour. I can assure you that your belongings will not be compromised.”

“'Compromised'?” Dan repeats, just because the use of the word seems particularly absurd to him and he stares at the man's pale hands, finally pulling his phone from his bag and holding down the button to shut it down, seeing Jonah do the same out of the corner of his eye. They nearly simultaneously drop their devices in one of his hands and the man grips them tightly as if expecting one of them to attempt to snatch it back and then slides them into the pocket of his slacks. Dan absent-mindedly touches his own front pocket where his second phone was buried and tries to play it off as a being fidgety but there was no indication that the man had noticed. The phone Dan had given him was his main one, the one where he kept his notes and received a majority of his messages but he had realized early on in his career that having another, smaller device to dole out to the sort of contacts or sources that he'd rather not run the risk of being easily tracked down (Mike obviously included) was a worthwhile investment. The only people who knew it existed besides himself were Kent and Amy (who also had a second phone that had made an appearance earlier at the restaurant); the people he gave the number to had no idea, thought they were getting his main number, and he was hoping he could continue keeping it that way.

“You can leave your bags at the desk,” the man repeats, “And then follow me up the stairs.” He walks away from them and Jonah starts to follow but Dan grabs the fabric of his jacket at the elbow and yanks him back.

“Jesus, Dan, what—”

“This doesn't feel a little Twilight Zone to you? At all?” Dan asks, voice hushed, and he gives Jonah a nudge, starts walking but takes his time, uses small steps and Jonah trips over his own feet trying to slow himself down so as not to go stumbling ahead.

“It's not that bad,” Jonah says.

“Not that— 'Not that bad'. They took our fucking phones away.”

“Yeah, okay,” Jonah says, slides his bag from his shoulder, clutching the strap in a tight fist, “That's kind of fucked up. But he didn't get my other phone so, you know...”

“You've got a second phone?”

“Duh. Don't you?”

“Yeah,” Dan admits but they're too close to the desk now for him to ask Jonah why someone like him would think he needed a second phone and where was it and was it at least on because fuck these people, he was going to find a way to get as much as he could without them knowing about it. Places that feel the need to strip you down before you're allowed in through to the Emerald City always had something hidden worth bringing kicking and screaming to the surface. They dump their bags on the floor next to the woman's chair and she kicks them underneath her desk with the side of her shoe. She produces two lined notepads and two pens bearing the Nuvarin logo and slaps them down on the table-top in front of them.

“For your notes,” she says, and then turns back to her computer. Dan and Jonah take them in order to keep up appearances and then go to join their escort at the bottom of the staircase.

“Now,” the man says, starting to ascend, “Nuvarin was, as I'm sure you know, founded in 1997 under the name of...”

\- -

Everything he tells them is something they could have read from the official website or the Wikipedia page and even what he explains about Emyxril sounds vaguely familiar, as if he was just picking and choosing choice words from headlines and first paragraphs from articles, sliding in a few complicated words, scattering just enough that Dan and Jonah have to ask him for definitions, hoping it would distract them from noticing the large gaps within his speeches. The floors he brings them to, the hallways he leads them down and the few windows they're allowed to peek into all look the same. People in white coats or basic suits move around desks or lab equipment, their movements stiff as if they had watched a movie about people doing scientific things and figured that was good enough to fool a random stranger. Then again, Dan has to admit to himself, the last time he was even so much as close to any set-ups like this was in high school when he had to take chemistry during his junior year (he'd enjoyed the experiments but math had never quite been one of his strong suits and he barely passed with a C, which he was relatively sure he only got because the teacher actually liked him) so it was possible that everyone was doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing and how they were supposed to be doing it. Other than the people behind glass and closed doors, they had seen nobody else as they were lead through the building, as if they were contagious and everyone had been advised to stay as far away as possible until they had left.

Jonah is surprisingly quiet during the entire thing, focusing on scribbling madly onto his pad of paper with a looping handwriting that Dan finds impossible to figure out and he momentarily wonders if Jonah's even writing anything at all, or if it's just lines made to look like letters and he has no intention of retaining any of the information their tour guide was currently spewing at them. Dan had written down a few ideas—mostly a list of questions he hoped to find answers for once he was back at his apartment—but had given up somewhere on the third floor, when the man had started to explain where the original brainstorming for Emyxril had taken place and Dan realizes that they were getting, most likely, the same spiel that all the other journalists who had tried to talk to them about this months ago.

What if they had lied and claimed to be writing for a medical journal? It was obvious from Jonah's website that they weren't, but the way that the question was so quickly posed to them made it seem as if they were uneasy around people from outside the company who might actually know what they were talking about, more so than the average writer with an online encyclopedia, dictionary, and a search engine in their pockets. Dan touches his pocket again, feels the phone resting there and exhales slowly. Not a beep nor a buzz from it yet and neither from the one that Jonah claimed to be in possession of; either they both forgot to turn them on earlier or they were just both extraordinarily lucky.

They turn a corner, footsteps muffled by grey carpet, and enter a long hallway, pausing in front of a large window that was only four or five feet tall but at least more than ten feet long. The glass was a strange shade of red and, inside, men and women in white coats that hung just to their knees and clear masks over their eyes, spoons, stirring sticks, and syringes with gaping needles in their hands, their backs hunched as they worked. Their tour guide began to elucidate on the scene they were currently taking in when Jonah interrupts him to ask about the bathroom.

“Well, I—” The man starts to say, but Dan cuts him off.

“He's got IBS. Irritable bowel,” Dan says, keeps his voice low as if he doesn't want to embarrass Jonah despite the fact that the guy is standing only a few inches away from him and they're the only three people currently standing there. “I'd let him go if I were you.” The man looks perplexed, like he hadn't anticipated this and was completely unsure of what he was supposed to do but he finally sighs, shoulders dropping and he directs him towards the left side of the hallway.

“Down the hall and make a right. There are signs. You can't miss it. We'll wait here.”

“You're a lifesaver, dude,” Jonah says, walking backwards and pointing two finger guns at their escort, who turns to stare through the red window, hands behind his back. Jonah glances at Dan, shows him his phone, raises his eyebrows and nods and then disappears down the hall and around the corner. It takes Dan a few seconds to figure out what Jonah was going to try to do but, by the time he sorts it out, Jonah is long gone and he's left there alone with their suddenly quiet tour guide. A couple minutes pass and Dan figures he might just be content with doing absolutely nothing until the man starts to question what was taking Jonah so long, but he knows that remaining silent might be more suspicious and he might as well use this time to give a shot at getting some answers out of him.

“You know,” Dan says, “Whatever you wanted to say, you can tell me. I'll, uh, write it down.” He holds up his notepad. “I can tell him later. He won't care.” Which Dan feels is mostly accurate. He's barely spent a day with Jonah (and, shit, has it only been one day so far?) and he's already starting to get a basic idea of how he worked. He only seems to pay attention when what you're telling him is actually interesting, but you have no idea if what you're telling him is interesting until he starts paying attention. Dan hates that he's already starting to understand this Jolly Green Giant, had hoped they could get through this without knowing anything about each other.

“I suppose,” the man says, sounding horribly put upon and he starts to explain what the lab coats were doing and why it mattered and Dan dutifully wrote down what he said, all the while keeping a careful eye to where Jonah had vanished, practically counting each minute he did not return and speculating on how long it would be before the man would send out a search party to raid the building for the missing journalist. He finishes his song and dance and Dan sees him glance down the hallway as well so Dan clears his throat and grabs his attention back to himself.

“You're certainly putting a lot of early publicity into something that won't be marketable for at least another couple of years.” He knows enough about how drugs and the FDA work thanks to Ben, the guy who usually writes the articles about this sort of thing and who had spent at least one afternoon ranting about protocols and “asshole pharmaceutical companies who think they can just invent a pill and get it on the shelves in a few weeks, for crying out loud did they buy their degrees on the fucking internet or something?”. Any other journalist would probably have an aneurysm if they found out that someone like Dan, who usually worked strictly on politics, was creeping onto their turf but Ben would probably be grateful that he didn't have to handle whatever mess this Nuvarin situation might turn out to be in the end. These days, he liked the kind of stories that involved a few phone calls or emails and didn't require much movement from his desk.

“That is true,” the man says, a hint of what could have been a smile on his face, “But the progress that is being made here at Nuvarin, especially with our shining star, Emyxril, is worth a bit of tooting one's own horn, don't you agree?”

“Why not,” Dan says, smiles back at him, tries to put as much friendliness as possible into the gesture and the man rocks on his heels again and, once again, they lapse into an awkward silence. What else could he ask? What would Ben want to know? “You've told us what you hope the drug will do but, of course, with any pill there are going to be side effects...” Dan prods and he sees the man stop moving, freezes when he hears those two words and he furrows his brow, almost appearing disappointed, as if he expected better of Dan to go into that territory.

“Yes, well...” he begins to say, the gears practically visible as they churn, spinning wildly in his head, but any string of excuses or assurances he was going to shove at Dan are interrupted by the sound of feet running in their direction and both he and Dan turn to see Jonah coming swiftly at them from around the corner.

“Time to go,” Jonah says quickly, hesitating next to Dan but looking as if he really didn't want to not be moving.

“What—?” Dan starts but Jonah puts a hand on his shoulder and then slides it down his arm to hold his elbow, fingers digging into his forearm.

“I forgot... I forgot about an appointment we had with Richard. He'll lose his fucking mind if we're late,” Jonah says, pulls on Dan who digs his heels into the carpet. “Dan. Dan, come on.”

“But we haven't finished yet,” the man says, looking somewhere between annoyed and confused.

“We have to go,” Jonah says, completely ignoring anybody but Dan, speaking with a tone that said if he didn't fucking go, Jonah was probably going to pick him up and physically carry him down the stairs.

“Alright,” Dan says, “Alright.” He turns to look at their escort with an apologetic look, even though his mind is racing, even though the only thing he's thinking is: _What did you do, what the fuck did you do, Jonah_. “Sorry about,” he gestures to Jonah, “This. We've got a lot of good stuff here.” He waves his notepad. “We'll call you if we've got any other follow-up questions.”

“Your phones,” the man says almost weakly as Jonah drags Dan towards where the staircase was and he walks briskly over to them, fishing the devices out of his pocket with a sweaty hand and dropping them into Dan's waiting palm.

“Thanks,” Dan says. “Bye.” They're flying down the stairs and they've made it nearly half-way down when Dan hears distant shouting, people saying to stop them, stop them before they leave but Jonah's leading them forward with an impossible momentum. _What did you do, what the fuck did you do_ , he thinks, over and over as they stumble downwards, twisting around corners and they rush into the lobby, making a detour at the front desk for their bags and Dan's relatively sure that the one he has now hanging over his shoulder belongs to Jonah but he doesn't have a chance to switch them around as they burst through the doors and out into the parking lot.

There's a mad dash to where Jonah's car was sitting, patiently waiting, and Jonah goes around to the passenger side to push Dan into the seat, as if he thought Dan would refuse to go in on his own and he runs around the back of the vehicle, tripping over his own feet and landing hard on the pavement. He scrambles up again, throwing himself behind the wheel and he takes a couple of tries to jam the key into the ignition but he finally gets the engine started and he doesn't bother with his seatbelt before throwing the car into reverse, pulling out of their spot, shoving it into drive and pushing a lead foot on the gas.

The black gate opens automatically for them but the guard station is still empty and Dan glances in the sideview mirror to see a group of people dressed in dark clothes standing in front of the Nuvarin building, watching the two of them drive away.

\- -

They're on a quiet road, somewhere far enough away from Nuvarin that they can't see it anymore and Jonah finally slows the vehicle down to somewhere under the speed limit, his knuckles white as he clutches onto the steering wheel. Jonah's bag is in Dan's lap and he's still got both of their phones clenched tightly in the hand they were put into, his own bag tossed sloppily in the back seat and he has to be thankful at least that Jonah hadn't accidentally left it behind.

“Stop the car, Jonah,” Dan yells at him. His heart is palpitating, his head is swimming, a strange clenching and fuzzy feeling in his chest, and he can't fucking deal with right now, this can't be happening, not in front of Jonah. His stupid fucking anxiety, which he had thought he had controlled, had pushed down and hidden away, that he had managed to live with for years and not allowed it to affect his work was now rearing it's disfigured head and laughing at him. Nobody knew this about him and he allowed it to bother him so rarely that he almost occasionally forgot about it himself but instead, here was, two seconds from putting his head between his knees because this wasn't how things were supposed to go, this wasn't the way he did things. Jonah Ryan was a natural disaster and Dan was already getting pulled into the whirlwind, no matter how tightly he held onto solid ground with an unyielding grip. He wanted to scream. He wanted the car to fucking stop moving.

Dan sits up straight, takes in a few slow and deep breaths and then smacks Jonah on the back of the shoulder. “Stop the fucking car!” Jonah does, eventually, pulling over to the side of the road and he slowly turns off the engine but goes back to holding the wheel in front of him as if he let go of it for too long he might float away. His eyes dart towards the rearview mirror but there's nobody coming and Dan takes off his seatbelt and opens the door, exiting the car to stand and he rests his arms on the roof, lowering his head between them for a moment. _What did you do, what the fuck did you do, Jonah_... “What did you do?” He asks, bends down to speak to him through the open door and Jonah coughs, clears his throat. “Jonah. Fucking answer me. What did you do.”

“I just decided to, you know, have a look around,” Jonah says, fingers drumming. “And, uh. I saw something, Dan.” Dan's considering the best way to completely rip this guy a few new ones because, for fuck's sake, all they had to do was make it through the asinine tour and then take what they were given, stew on it for a day or two, do some goddamn research, talk to some other people, and then come back at them with armor piercing question after armor piercing question until they got the pay dirt they were aching for, like it was no big deal but the soft and spooked way that Jonah said his words and the suddenly obvious pallidness to his face makes him pause, eyes narrowed.

“What did you see?” Jonah doesn't answer right away, stays where he is and stares ahead so Dan walks around to the driver's side door and opens it, bending down and all but grasping Jonah by the collar and shaking him until he starts to talk. “Jonah, I swear to God—”

“Okay! Okay. Just... move, alright. Move.” Dan rises, steps to the side to allow Jonah to clamber out of his seat and now they're both standing on the side of the road with nothing but the sinister trees stretched out on either side of them like an impenetrable wall of waving arms, the only sound the wind and the soft rush of cars on the highway that, if Dan closed his eyes, almost could be mistaken for the ocean. Jonah fumbles around in his pockets, fingers scrambling in his jacket and his pants (the knees of which were torn and dirty from his fall in the parking lot) and he finally finds his second phone, the one they weren't supposed to have in the first place and it's impressive, really, unlike Dan's alternate device which was merely the cheapest model he could find that didn't require him to flip it open and he crowds in next to him, watching as Jonah turns on the screen to find that the camera was still recording. “Shit,” Jonah says, taps the red button to stop it and turns to lean against the vehicle, cupping his hand over the screen to better see what he was doing. Rain as fine as mist starts to cover them with a thin coat of cold and bitter tasting water but neither of them seek shelter from it, Jonah because he was busy and Dan because he was too stubborn, despite the fact that the suit he was wearing was definitely dry clean only and he's sure the place he usually takes them is over-charging him but they're convenient and never try to make small talk, which is really all Dan could ever ask for these days.

He's still got both his own and Jonah's phone in his pocket and he finally pulls them out and turns them both on, busies himself as he listens to the tinny sounds of Jonah rewinding, stopping, watching and then rewinding again. Their phones explode with chirps and beeps from missed messages and alerts and Dan scrolls through his and then absent-mindedly finds himself doing the same with Jonah's, realizes what he's doing and stops himself before he starts reading through his emails, as tempting as it was to go through with it. He pockets it instead, keeps playing around with the one in his hand.

“Who's Richard?” He asks, the name still stuck in his head.

“Just some guy I know,” Jonah says. “Helps me with the site sometimes.”

“Oh.” That's the end of the conversation and Dan gets lost in responding to something Sue had forwarded him that Kent apparently sent specifically to her but she decided that the staff deserved to know what was typed there as well, uses his sleeve to occasionally wipes the rainwater from the screen and he's about to move it to the folder where he stores all his basic work correspondences when he hears Jonah curse, a lengthy string of jumbled words. He lifts his head, pockets his phone and wanders back over to where he's still propped up against his car. He doesn't say anything as Jonah turns the phone sideways and continues to shield the screen and the two of them lean forward, their heads practically touching as Jonah hits 'play'.

The camera is pointed at the carpet and at Jonah's feet and they can hear Jonah talking to himself, giving himself a reassuring pep-talk, saying that it's fine, that he won't be caught and he keeps it facing down as he moves, keeping at a relatively steady pace. He pauses a few times, holds the camera up to unmarked doors and blacked-out windows, asks himself where everybody was, and it was a good question; there wasn't the murmur of people working through walls or from the cracks around the door frames, only Jonah's feet as he scuffed them down the hallway and the buzz of the white lights that stretched along the ceiling.

Jonah's hand is trying doorknobs but they're all locked and there's a brief moment of the inside of Jonah's jacket and then there's his hand again as he's opening a door and he peers inside, feeling around for a light switch but, once illuminated, all that's inside seems to be old rusted desks and cardboard boxes with incomprehensible labels scrawled on the sides in black sharpie. He walks inside with cautious steps and lifts the lid of the first box he finds but it's full of nothing but empty folders. The next one is more of the same and the third is packed with nothing but air.

“Real compelling stuff here, Jonah,” Dan says, glances up at him but Jonah shakes his head.

“Hold on,” he says, swipes his finger along the bottom of the screen to move everything forward a couple of minutes and, as it speeds by, Dan sees more of Jonah's feet, more doors and not much else. Jonah let's go, points, nodding. “Here. Here we go.”

Jonah walks around a corner to the end of a hallway with a heavy door that seemed horribly misplaced and he tries the handle that, despite the fancy keycard lock, opens easily, as if somebody had purposely left it open for him and they can hear him mutter “what the fuck” as he slips past it. He stops, slowly lifts the camera up to where there was a similar window to the one that he had left Dan and their tour guide standing in front of, except the glass wasn't red and instead was so clear that it almost seemed as if it wasn't even there at all. Despite that, the glare from the lights made it difficult to see inside so Jonah takes a few steps forward, nearly holding his phone directly up against the glass but all that there is is an empty room with white walls, a few dim orange lights and what appeared to be an equally white tile floor.

Dan wants to say something, to remark on the fact that, yeah, that's really something worth running away from, an empty room, but, for some reason, the words won't come out, refuse to make it farther than the back of his throat and he touches the car behind him, feels the cool metal against his fingertips.

“Wait for it,” Jonah says, as if Dan had indeed questioned him and Dan swallows, thumbnail scratching against the car, back and forth, back and forth, because even if it turns out to be a moth suddenly fluttering into view and managing to accidentally appear monstrous, the build-up to the reveal is making him even more anxious than he already was currently. Something moves, just for a few seconds, to the right of the screen, a brief shadow, a form that could have been a shoulder and part of an arm, but it disappears just as quickly as it was seen and Dan frowns.

“Was that it?” He asks. Just a man in an empty room. Probably a janitor cleaning up or a decorator figuring out where the new desks would go, not really a big fucking deal. He watches as the Jonah on screen lifts a hand, curls it into a loose fist, lightly raps on the glass a few times with the knuckle on his index finger. The body that slams into the glass hits with such a sickening force that Dan is surprised that it doesn't shatter and the noise that it makes is unlike anything he's ever heard before in his life: it's a sort of shrieking wail that filled every space around them, even as it was broadcasting through tiny speakers and it was as if the trees were shaking from the noise. Its figure was hunched and elongated, the face seemed stretched, malformed and almost like rubber, the hole where the mouth was a gaping circle of utter darkness. It's keening continued and the version of Jonah on camera stumbles back with shock as doors down the hallway begin to fling open and voices of people asking what was going on, trying to divide their attention between their monstrosity and the man who had woken it up.

Jonah taps the screen to pause it on an image of his shoes and, for a moment, neither of them speak.

“That was...” Dan starts, forcing out a rough laugh. “That was just someone fucking around with you,” he says.

“Sure, right,” Jonah agrees half-heartedly. “Someone fucking around with me. Because a company like Nuvarin totally had time between us showing up and me wandering off to put together something like that.”

“Alright,” Dan says, taking a step back. “Fuck you, Jonah. I'm just saying that whatever the hell you _think_ that was, I guarantee that it _isn't_ that.”

“Do you want to see it again?” Jonah asks, holds up his phone and Dan lifts his hands up, shaking his head.

“ _No_ ,” he says, “No.”

“I should upload this online, right? Post it on my site. And then we can—” Jonah yelps when Dan marches over to him, grabs him by the shoulders and shoves him back against the car, holding him there. “Jesus Christ, Dan what the fuck—”

“You aren't going to show that to anyone else, you got it?” Dan speaks with his jaw clenched, gives Jonah a single shake.

“Yeah, but—”

“No 'buts'! Just do as I say for one fucking minute today, alright? Best case scenario, people think it's some stupid CGI viral video Slender Man shit, praise it for a couple weeks and then forget about it. Worst case, Nuvarin will claim it was a prank and—as much as I'd fucking love to see you get made the butt of everybody's jokes—you'll be laughed at for the rest of your life for taking that at face value and nobody will ever take you seriously as a journalist for the rest of you goddamn life.” Dan let's him go and walks away, taking a moment to catch his breath. He's seen it before and he'll probably see it again, especially during a time where nearly everybody has a camera and access to basic editing software. Journalists find videos online, built and stitched together too cleanly or merely taken out of context from something a lot longer that was hacked up and posted by some guy with a dangerous agenda and they assume it's real. They report on it, air it in a near constant loop while they research and gouge on false information until, eventually, people pick the video apart with tweezers or the original filmmaker creeps from the shadows and the journalists have to admit publicly that they had screwed the pooch on that one. If they were lucky, they'd be mocked for awhile until everyone moves on and their careers would be salvageable and the world would only see it as a footnote in their biographies. Unlucky and they find themselves a laughing stock for decades and maybe they'd still write, maybe they'd still have work, but everything they talk about would be forever linked with their gullibility.

Dan hadn't been kidding when he had said that he would enjoy watching Jonah crash and burn, become one of those pariahs, and he'd probably be laughing right along with the rest of them, but the fact that Jonah could very easily take Dan down with him was tripping him up. All Jonah would have to say was that Dan was with him, no more and no less, and any respect that he had gained from his peers would be brought down a few notches. Dan working with Jonah? Jonah could swim to the surface, agree that it was a hoax and that Dan was involved in it, could even say he orchestrated the whole thing and there'd be no denying it; Jonah had the two of them running away on film, had both their voices. Besides, the last thing Dan wanted was to make that thing public so soon after watching it. He's sure there's a simple explanation for it but if it really was something as fucked up as it appeared, Jonah's video was the only evidence. The closer they kept it to their chests, the more leverage they had. Better to be safe than so very fucking sorry.

He tries to spell this out to Jonah, tells him his reasoning and, to his surprise, Jonah nods the entire time.

“I see your point,” Jonah says. “I have to at least put it on my computer, gotta back this shit up.”

“No. No copies,” Dan says, reaches out to snatch the phone from Jonah's hand, moving too quickly for him to even consider pulling back. “It doesn't leave this phone. I don't trust you. Not as far as I could throw you. So I'm holding on to this.” Jonah tries to make a grab for it but Dan moves it away. “You're lucky I'm not burying it out there in the woods. Here.” He takes Jonah's other phone—his original one—from his pocket and tosses it back to him. “You can have this one though.”

“You turned it on?” Jonah whines, starts poking through it as if he thought Dan messed around with his settings when he was busy and almost frowns when he sees that everything was as he left it.

“Now, Jonah, for the love of God, please take me home. I don't even want to look at you again until tomorrow,” Dan says. It's still raining and his clothes are starting to feel heavy, his skin cold and damp and he runs a hand through his hair and wipes it off on his pants but that only makes it wetter. Jonah's eyes look momentarily bright at the mention of them seeing each other the next day but he reins it in and gives Dan a clumsy salute, climbing back into the driver's seat. Dan follows, sliding into the seat next to him, slamming the door with more force than necessary and Jonah turns the keys, turns on the heat just low enough to keep the chill from seeping into their bones and then pulls back onto the road heading, hopefully, in the right direction.

\- -

They get stuck in traffic which stretches their drive back to the city by at least an hour but Jonah does as Dan asks, takes him back to Jonah's apartment where Dan had left his car and his computer and, before he leaves, he convinces Dan that they should exchange numbers, “just in case”. Dan puts Jonah as 'Frankenstein', makes sure Jonah sees it and then tells him not to call him for the rest of the day, no matter what happens.

Dan stops at a restaurant that he doesn't recognize and orders a cheeseburger, devouring it in only a few bites and it makes him feel sick but it's the biggest meal he's had since that morning if he didn't count the tiramisu as a meal and, when his plate is being taken away, he checks the time to find that it's only just five in the evening but it feels so much later. He takes some time with the almost comforting sound of people eating and carrying on insignificant conversations around him to check his messages but there's nothing there that requires an immediate response. Kent deserves an update but he has no idea what he could possibly tell him and he knows at some point he has to return Amy's notes and stumble into a half-apology that he would hope will get her back on his good side for long enough that she'd be willing to give him a helping hand just in case he needed it.

He goes home because he can't possibly imagine crawling back into work and, once he's in his apartment, he turns the television on, volume low just for the ambience, and digs a beer out from his fridge, popping the cap off and taking a long drink. Shoes are kicked off, tie is loosened and he decides to strip and dress himself in pants that should have been thrown away years ago and a shirt emblazoned with his college name in faded letters. He considers taking a hot shower but flops down at his desk instead, leaning his chair back on two legs to grab for his bag that he had dumped next to the couch, fishing around until he finds Jonah's second phone.

All four legs of the chair back on solid ground, he leans forward and moves the phone from one hand to the other, finally turning it on and watching as the animation and flashing lights dance on the screen. He thinks about going through Jonah's contact list, scanning through his recent messages, but instead he finds the video, tapping it to full screen, making sure he doesn't accidentally hit 'play'. He stares at it for a moment before letting out a lengthy exhale and then scoots back, searches through the draws in his desk, pulling a cord free from a tangled mess of other ones that he figured would probably fit in the phone's USB drive. And then he does exactly what he told Jonah not to: he plugs the phone into his laptop and puts the video on his computer.

He leaves the phone plugged in to charge to battery (sometimes, Dan can be considerate if he wants to) and opens the video in the only player he has and rubs the back of his neck. It's over thirty minutes long because of everything that Jonah had captured while they ran away but it seemed even longer when he and Jonah had been watching while they stood on the side of the road and he clicks on the fast-forward button, holding it down until he finds the only important part. He leans his elbows on the desk, puts his head between his forearms and let's it play, watches Jonah rapping on the glass, jumps when the person-shaped thing slams into the window, winces slightly when it starts to make it's noise and he jams his finger down on the volume until he can barely hear it. When it's over, he stops it, goes back and plays it again.

Dan watches it three more times and, on the fourth, he figures out how to slow it down, watches it nearly frame by frame, pauses it and looks through the program's menus to find a way to take snapshots of the screen. He takes at least twenty and then makes a new folder to store them and the video in, gives it an uninteresting label and hides it inside five other folders, puts it somewhere he knows nobody would bother looking if they somehow got their hands on his laptop. But who would?

He watches it one more time at regular speed and he feels his mouth go dry. It's just a prank. It has to be but he knows, in the very back of his mind, that Jonah had a point: There's no possible way the employees of Nuvarin could have possibly planned this out between their arrival and when Jonah decided to sneak away and start filming. Besides, how could they possibly know that Jonah would make his way down that specific hallway? And what if he did but he hadn't bothered trying the (mysteriously unlocked) door? And why, then, were people coming out of rooms like wasps evacuating a disturbed hive if it was all a fucking joke? But this... Things like whatever the hell was in there didn't exist. They weren't real. There are humans, there are animals and there are bacteria. There is no such thing as monsters. The only time that Dan had ever thought that was when he was a little kid and thought there was one under his bed until his father shoved his face down there with a flashlight and proved to him that it was only a pile of dirty clothes and toys.

There was a reasonable explanation for this and he was going to figure it out. Pen in one hand, piece of scrap paper in the other, he starts to make a list. Talk to Caitlin again, ask where she heard Eric Nagel's name, why she knows what she knows because both he and Jonah were way too quick on attaching to his name and didn't ask the right questions when they had the chance. Find Ronald Sharman's wife, see if she'll talk to them. Look more into his disappearance. It was either connected or just a pretty fucking big coincidence. Dan finishes the now lukewarm beer and listens idly as the female reporter on the news behind him talks about something having to do with Congresswoman Meyer.

The consequences of Jonah's snooping are going to rear it's ugly head sooner or later but, for now, there was work to do before the shit hits the fan and he could only hope he was fast enough to dodge out of the way.

\- -

Dan stays up for hours, looking into Ronald Sharman, the video paused on an image of the thing on the other side of the glass, staring at him with shadowy eyes every time he switched windows.

He wakes up the next morning to dark grey skies and the shrill sound of his phone ringing somewhere deep in the bag that was still on the floor near the couch. He looks at the clock on his computer and he blinks a few times until the number come into focus, groaning when he sees that it's only just five-thirty and he buries his head in his arms and yells.

His phone has stopped by the time he manages to drag himself from his chair—his muscles and neck tense and achey—and into the rest of his apartment and he checks it while he fumbles with his coffee machine, a bulky monstrosity with too many buttons that his mother had gotten him when he moved into this place, saying that it was one of the more practical things she could think of to give him and it was cheaper than buying the overpriced cups of waste from “those busy coffee places or whatever they're called”. It turned out to be nearly impossible to figure out, even with the manual, and the beans he had to buy for it every three months or so cost more than he thought he should pay for them but, on the rare occasion that he got it to work it did produce a decent cup of dark, steaming coffee.

The call he had missed was from Jonah and he almost decides to ignore it but something told him that the guy might not stop calling him until Dan responded so he re-dials, holds the phone to his ear as he dumps a hearty scoop of coffee beans into the machine. Jonah answers on the third ring.

“What the hell is so important that you had to call me at five in the morning, Jonah?”

“I was looking into Caitlin,” Jonah says, “And you won't fucking believe what I found out.”

“Jesus, you even sound like a clickbait headline when you talk.” He closes the lid and pushes a button, walks away to sit at his desk when the machine starts to gurgle and whirr so he can hear Jonah more clearly. “What was it?”

“Caitlin Kirchner? Not her real fucking name.” Dan can practically see his expectant look mixed with victory, like a dog that just brought back the stick and was waiting to be patted on the head and told he was a good boy.

“Just the Kirchner part or the whole thing?”

“The whole she-fucking-bang,” Jonah says.

“How'd you find this?”

“Trade secret,” Jonah says. “I can't tell you everything. That'd ruin all my mystery.”

“Your 'mystery'?” Dan snorts.

“Yeah, dude. People are into that,” Jonah says with complete sincerity. The machine starts to spit out coffee in a steady stream and Dan stands again, wandering over to it, fingers drumming on the counter. “This one time, I—”

“Jonah, I literally couldn't care less about your probably freakish personal life. Just tell me about Caitlin.”

“It'd be easier to show you,” Jonah says, “And since you won't give me your email address...”

“With good reason.” Dan closes his eyes and sighs. “Fine. I need to go into work for some stupid meeting and fill Kent in, try to explain what the hell is going on without actually telling him what's going on and then I'll come over.” He hangs up without saying goodbye or checking to make sure that's actually alright with him and throws the phone towards the couch, watching as it bounces on the cushions and then returns his attention back to his coffee.

\- -

Dan considers leaving Jonah's phone at his apartment but the thought of it just sitting there makes him itchy so he pockets it along with his other two before he leaves. Work is work and he's stuck in the _Leviathan_ building for almost an hour, spewing out a decent mix of the truth and just enough distortions to said truth to convince even himself that he was running with a slightly different story than the one that he and Jonah seem to be wading into suddenly. He returns Amy's notes and she glares at him the entire time, snatching the folders and checking them like she's counting money, making sure that everything was still there. He tells her they were useless anyway, which was pretty much true and she gives him the evil eye but it already seems to be a mostly half-hearted attempt at being angry at him. Before he walks away, she asks him if things are going well.

“Yes and no,” he says because, honestly, he couldn't decide. “Yours?”

“Interesting developments,” she says, swinging her chair to face her computer, signaling the end of the conversation.

Dan's surprised that he remembers where Jonah's apartment is despite the fact that he was only paying enough attention the first time to keep track of the back of Jonah's vehicle and he parks a couple of blocks away and walks, climbing up the stairs to the second floor and pounding with a closed fist on the black, paint-peeling door, hoping that it's the right number.

Jonah opens it mid-knock and he's dressed in the clothes he probably slept in, his hair a mess and Dan wonders when Jonah spent time to look into Caitlin, if he did it all as soon as he got home and actually sat on it until the morning because Dan had specifically told him he hadn't wanted to hear from him the rest of the day.

“You're not even dressed yet?” Dan asks.

“I was just going to when you— Could you just...” Jonah holds up a finger and starts to close the door again. “Just wait out here.”

“Are you— I'm not standing out here in he hallway while you get dressed, Jonah,” Dan says and pushes past him to get inside, making a beeline for Jonah's couch and drops down, immediately starting to go through the papers with Jonah's erratic handwriting and he can hear Jonah cursing and muttering and he disappears into a small room, closing the door loudly behind him. Most of what Dan reads doesn't make sense, letters connected and stretched out but he's pretty sure he can make out Caitlin's name in there somewhere. Jonah comes out from his room a few minutes later and he's like a cartoon character, as if he had gone to a store and just bought multiple copies of the same suit because it worked fine, nobody's ever complained. He sits down next to Dan and bends forward, waking his sleeping laptop up with a hit to the spacebar and then snatches the piece of paper Dan was currently holding out of his hands. “It's not like I can read your psychotic scrawling anyway,” Dan says. “So what was it that you had to show me?” He makes it sound like the last place he wants to be is right where he is, which is only partly true, since he knew that, eventually, they would have to share the same space again at some point and that, once again, it was his idea in the first place that they collaborate. The fact that Jonah seems to be some sort of machine, that he keeps managing to find bits and pieces of things that Dan knows he should be able to find faster or easier is making him, at the very least, grumpy. Jonah's just some asshole with a blog. Dan writes for the goddamn Leviathan.

“Like I said,” Jonah is saying, “Caitlin Kirchner seems to be just some name pulled from the clouds. Meet:” Jonah turns his laptop so the screen is facing Dan more directly and he finds himself staring at a cached page, an interactive screen capture from 2009 when Nuvarin's website was nothing more than a template with a few menus and the logo stamped at the top of the page. It's a list of the employees (the ones that mattered, that is) and Jonah scrolls awkwardly until he stops at the young but recognizable face of Caitlin Kirchner. Except, according to the website, her name was: “Amanda Stafford.”

“Human Resources, huh?” Dan picks up the laptop and balances it on his knees, reading through her short biography but it's mostly just where she went to school and how she got to work at Nuvarin. “She must have really fucked up if they had to take Miss Corporate and turn her into a waitress.”

“Probably has to do with the kid, right?” Jonah suggests, taking his laptop back, propping his feet up on the edge of his coffee table, his computer resting on the slope of his thighs.

“I'd imagine so,” Dan says. “I'm sure that's part of it at least.” Although what any of this has to do with Lombardi is still utterly baffling and it doesn't even answer the question as to who wrote the fake letter on official stationary, but it's possible, Dan figures, it was just some lawyer taking matters into his own hands and deciding what was best for the situation without regard for what Lombardi actually wanted. Maybe the letter wasn't a lie, either. Maybe the kid wasn't actually his after all but he was the easiest person to untangle from this Nuvarin web for Caitlin to find and that threatening him with fatherhood was her best bet at getting him to talk to her. Or, maybe, this whole situation with the kid was horribly irrelevant. There was, of course, one way to find all of this out: “We have to talk to her again.”

“No shit,” Jonah agrees but neither of them move and Dan's about to say _hey, Jonad, sometime today, preferably in the next couple minutes would be ideal_ but then Jonah is turning the computer towards him again and pointing at an image from the cached Nuvarin site of the company's employees standing together for a stiffly posed group shot. There are a lot of unfamiliar faces but, standing front and center, is Theodore Nagel, a wide, white-toothed grin spread across his oddly square face. To his left, slightly hunched and thin, seeming as if the last place he wanted to be was surrounded by other people, forced to pose with a camera shoved in his face is Eric, Theodore's brother, and, to his left, Dan recognizes Ronald Sharman from a photograph that had been uploaded to a local police blotter during the height of his disappearance. Caitlin (then known as Amanda) is standing in front of Ronald, just off to the side with a small smile and her hands behind her back. She doesn't look pregnant in the photo but, then again, Dan hasn't seen many pregnant women before.

“If Ronald's in the picture then why the hell isn't he listed on that fancy employee page?” Dan asks. Why include a man in your company photograph if you won't openly acknowledge that he worked there? Everything Dan had found out about him last night (which, arguably, was very little) was that he went to the same university as Theodore and Lombardi, graduated alongside them and then went on his own way. There was no indication that he was involved in the Nagel pharmaceutical venture, nor did he go into politics like Lombardi eventually did, yet here he was, posing with the brothers outside the Nuvarin front doors. He'd tried to track down Ronald on social media but his Facebook had been inactive and left as a shrine since he disappeared and his wife's account was locked completely to the public and Dan didn't blame her. She was probably doing it to avoid what Dan was already doing and that was as far as he had gotten before he fell asleep. He rubs his hands over his face and exhales noisily, sitting forward and grabbing at Jonah's laptop, opening a new, blank document and bangs out the word 'TIMELINE' at the top of the page. “Alright,” Dan says, writes 'Theodore, Company: 2004'. “Teddy gets the company, everything's fine until the fraud investigation which was...” He pauses, closes his eyes but opens them again when Jonah says:

“2011.”

“Right.” Dan writes that down next. “Eric comes running to his older brother's side. Lasts nearly a year and a half. Everything's all tied and buried some time in 2012. Nobody talks about it anymore. Hands have been scrubbed clean, no evidence, blah blah blah.” He writes that part next, shortens it to dates and a couple of words. “So this photo,” he points to the screen, “Had to have been taken before the fraud investigation ended and before Eric dropped off the face of the Earth, before Ronald didn't come home and before Caitlin or Amanda or whatever-the-fuck her name is got fired.” He adds that to the list, following it up with a series of question marks and then minimizes the document to bring the picture back, front and center on the screen. “So what the fuck happened after this photo?”

“And what does it have to do with the fucking alien in their building?” Jonah follows with and Dan groans.

“It's not an alien, Jonah, for Christ's sake.”

“I'm sorry,” Jonah says with a slight edge of hostility in his voice, “Did we watch the same video? Because I'm pretty sure whatever that thing was, it's definitely a mother-fucking alien.”

“I've never considered you to be top tier as far as intellect went, Jonah, but I held out some hope that you weren't entirely a lost cause. It seems I've been proven horribly, horribly wrong,” Dan says.

“What is it then, hm? What is that thing? Because it sure as fuck isn't human, _Dan_. I cannot believe that you're so in denial that you—”

“ _Denial?_ I can't believe that you see something a little strange and the first conclusion you frog leap to is 'oh, yeah, definitely an extraterrestrial'! You probably saw the Patterson Film and thought that Bigfoot really was roaming around California.” It's feeling warmer in the apartment than it had been before and Dan pushes the laptop sideways off his legs onto the space between them on the couch with just enough force to show his annoyance but not enough that he'd actually break it and then he stands because he's not sure what else to do but he knows he can't have this argument while their faces are less than a foot apart.

“'A little strange'?!” Jonah exclaims. “That... _thing_ is your definition of 'a little strange'?”

“I don't know!” Dan yells and he's not sure if it's the volume with which he used or the tone of how he said it, but Jonah shuts down, mouth clamped shut and Dan takes in a few deep breaths, holding his head in his hands as if he's trying to keep it from falling off.

“Dude,” he hears Jonah say, “Are you... uh... you know. You alright?”

“I'm fine,” Dan lies, inhales, exhales, lifts his head.

“You don't—”

“I said I'm fine,” Dan repeats through gritted teeth. Reign it in, take back control. “I just need to eat.”

“I think,” Jonah says, rising to his feet and making his way towards his tiny kitchen, “I've got a power bar or something around here.” He's digging through drawers and cabinets and Dan feels his face flushing red but he's not entirely sure if it's out of irritation or embarrassment. Jonah's supposed to be making a fucking joke out of this, not be kind and try to fix things. He actually finds one, wrapped in silver foil, and he tosses it to Dan who easily catches it and he studies the label, finds it to be one of those high calorie, high energy kinds, made specifically for the types of people who push themselves too hard during a workout and need something to nibble on so they don't pass out in the locker room while trying to put on a clean pair of socks.

“I don't want your stupid power bar,” Dan says, watches as Jonah stops, hand on a cabinet door as he turns to stare at Dan. “Why do you even have this? You do know they're for people who actually work out, right?”

“I work out.” Jonah replies indignantly and Dan laughs. “You think this lean figure comes naturally?”

“How in the world have you possibly made it this far in life without being purposely run over by a car?”

“Dedication. Besides, joke's on you, Dan,” Jonah says, “I've already been hit by a car once.” Dan frowns, brow furrowed, because he honestly has no clue how he's supposed to respond to that, so he changes the subject instead.

“That video is bullshit,” Dan holds up a hand when Jonah opens his mouth and he actually doesn't say anything. “For now, we're going to do everything we should have done before we wound up at Nuvarin, which is get some goddamn answers out of some of the people who owe us a lot of them. We're going to start with Caitlin. Amanda. Whatever. And we're taking my car,” he says, fishing the keys from his pocket and making sure to grab his bag before walking out the apartment door, not waiting to hear if Jonah was following him.

\- -

While he drives, he makes Jonah look more into Ronald Sharman, has him search for more articles that he may have missed about his disappearance and have him begin to figure out where his wife was so they could make an attempt at sitting down to talk to her. They're about ten minutes away from the Rockport Diner when Jonah tells Dan that he's found three different 'Isabelle Sharman's in the area and asks if he should just start cold calling them until he contacts the right one.

“You have absolutely zero patience,” Dan says, pulling into the diner's parking lot and finding an empty space right by the ramp leading to the side entrance. “One thing at a time. Those numbers aren't going anywhere in the next few minutes.”

The place is slightly more crowded than it had been yesterday but it's still relatively calm for almost nine in the morning, couples and lonely older people sitting and just starting or nearly finishing their meals, conversations held at a low hum and the same woman who had seated Dan before is approaching them again, all smiles and wide arms. For a second, Dan thinks she's going to hug him and he takes a step away, flinches back and she hesitates, frowning briefly, collecting two menus in her hands.

“Same table as yesterday?” She asks and both he and Jonah shrug which she takes as a “yes” and, before she leads them to the already familiar booth, Dan stops her and asks if the waitress they had before (“Caitlin, was her name?”) was working that morning and the woman narrows her eyes, lines forming around her mouth. “Why?”

“It's kind of embarrassing,” Jonah says, a little louder than he probably needed, speaking over whatever Dan was probably about to say to her and Dan wonders if Jonah can feel him glaring at the back of his head. Jonah leans towards her conspiratorially and tries his best smirk and she moves back but doesn't look quite as leery as she had only a few seconds before. “My friend here,” He gestures to Dan with a thumb over his shoulder, “Got a little crush on her. He was hoping she'd be here again this morning. Wanted to see her again. Poor guy was too nervous to ask for her number. Actually threw up a little.” Jonah should practically be able feel the daggers being thrown into his back, which only makes Jonah's forced smile slightly more genuine. She glances at Dan and then looks back to Jonah, smiling almost sweetly in return and then puts a hand on his cheek.

“That's nice,” she says. “That's very nice. But unfortunately, that's also a load of horseshit.” She pats him once and then pulls her hand away, holding the menus in front of her and Dan frowns, his back stiffening.

“What.”

“Well, after you two left, Caitlin seemed very nervous and upset. She finished her shift and then told me she was quitting. Walked right out the door and I haven't heard from her since. I don't own this place and you haven't been making a scene so I don't want to get into trouble for kicking you out but I can politely suggest that you show yourselves out and never come back when I'm working.” She takes in a steady breath and Dan blinks a few times at her, Jonah surprisingly silent as well. “Now, would you two like some coffee to go or will that be all?”

\- -

The cups are steaming in the cup holders as they sit in the large parking lot of a dilapidated strip mall, the keys still in the ignition but the engine turned off. Dan had considered just staying in the space at the diner but he could feel the waitress watching him and it had made him jittery (the last bits of his near panic attack only an hour ago still clinging like gross, wet toilet paper) so he had driven a few blocks until he found where they were now just to have a moment to collect himself and figure out what their next move was going to be, since Caitlin was a dead end unless they wanted to spring for a private investigator to track her down (maybe later if the got desperate).

“This is all your fault,” Dan says to Jonah without looking at him and Jonah makes a grunting sound of being horribly incensed.

“How the hell is this my fault?”

“I don't know right now. But it has to be because it certainly isn't mine.” Dan's stomach is grumbling and he eyes a deli a few feet away, the blue faded sign and the flashing neon 'open' sign in the window but he doesn't feel like getting out of the car. He remembers something though, digs around in his bag and takes out the power bar that Jonah had given him and carefully unwraps it, taking a large bite. It's sticky and only vaguely sweet, the dried fruit and the chocolate pieces bitter, but he swallows it down because it was the best he was going to do right at that second.

“Can I have some of that?”

“No, fuck you. You gave this to me. It's mine.” He takes another healthy bite as if to prove a point and Jonah mutters something under his breath and picks up his coffee, lifting the lid off to blow at the dark liquid and then takes a few careful sips. “So no Cait— Amanda,” he corrects himself, “Because of course not. Why would this get any easier for us. Probably decided to turn whistleblower after all these years and then chose not to stick around for the aftermath. Thanks for dumping all this shit in our laps, Amanda.” He doesn't know why he's so angry. No matter what this turns out to be—what Nuvarin is involved in—there's potential for a damn great story, especially if they can get a perfect amount of ducks in a row and have them squawking in perfect harmony. It's finding that evidence, however, that's proving to be difficult and maybe that's what's getting to him, despite the fact that one of the first lessons he learned when he chose his current career was that unraveling the ungodly mess of tangled Christmas lights that a story could be might take weeks or months and that perseverance is the greatest skill you could master. Dan had assumed he had it, but it seemed as if Jonah's severe lack of patience was contagious and he was already starting to feel the symptoms. He holds the power bar between two fingers and picks up his own coffee, drinking from it and he puts it back down, reaches for his bag again and brings it into his lap, but he's not sure what's he's going to look for in it. “You still have that list of all of the 'Isabelle Sharman's around here?”

“Yeah, sure,” Jonah says, lifting from his seat just enough to get his phone from his pocket and he turns on the screen, brings up the tiny webpage he had been searching.

“Start calling them. If we can't find her and get her to talk to us, we're fucked. I can already hear square one in the distance calling our names.”

\- -

It takes longer than Dan expects for Jonah to get in contact with each woman even though there were only three of them. One wouldn't answer her phone until the sixth time that Jonah dialed her number and sat on the line, waiting for her to pick up. Another wasn't home and the third didn't live at the address the phone number listed was attached to but, luckily, the people living there were family friends and, with some creative lying coached to him by Dan, Jonah was able to get her new phone number, which he scribbled down on the palm of his hand with the Nuvarin pen Dan had dug up from the bottom of his bag. Jonah had pushed his seat back and was resting his long legs up on the dashboard, ignoring Dan's repeated threats to “get his filthy shoes back on the goddamn floor because if he didn't, something really fucking bad was going to happen”.

Their coffee cups were almost empty, the coffee that was left had gone cold and Dan had finished his power bar a few minutes earlier, the wrapper stuffed into his paper cup for lack of a better place to put it that wasn't just tossed in the backseat of his car. A woman who worked at the nail salon that they were parked directly in front of walks out, the bell on the door jingling and she pulls a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her apron, crossing an arm over her chest, hand resting in the crook of her elbow and she blows blue smoke up into the grey sky. She eyes Dan and Jonah strangely but she doesn't seem overtly concerned and she goes back to watching the cars speeding past on the road behind them.

Dan's barely paying attention to Jonah but he can hear him talking to someone, casual and almost bored like he's already given up when he sits up, his feet falling with a heavy thud and Dan looks away from the smoking woman, glowers when Jonah touches his arm, as if telling him to wait just a minute.

“Mrs. Sharman,” he's saying, “We've been trying— Yes, yes we are. Sort of it. It's complicated. We— Well, no. Bu—” Dan brushes Jonah's hand away and points to the phone and then his ear and Jonah shakes his head, doesn't understand but then he gets it, tells her to hold on and pulls the phone away, laying it flat in his hand and changing it to speaker. “I've, uh, got my friend here with me, Mrs. Sharman. We work together.” There was so much in that sentence that Dan wanted to argue with (he and Jonah are _not_ friends and they definitely may be working side-by-side right now but they don't work _together_ , that's a very important distinction) but he clears his throat instead and twists in his seat, leaning his arms on top of the center console.

“Hi. I'm, uh, I'm Dan Egan.”

“Dan Egan?” Her voice sounds far away and static-y and both he and Jonah have to bend in closer, but it's better than nothing. “You write for _The Leviathan_ , don't you? I recognize the name.” Dan glances up at Jonah and grins.

“Yes, that's me, ma'am.”

“Goodness. Well, your friend told me you two were looking into my husband's disappearance, is that right?”

“Ronald, yes. We're...” How should he put this? He doesn't want to give her false hope, make her think the case is being dug up again, that there are any new leads. “We're actually looking into Nuvarin, the company he worked for. That and Theodore and Eric Nagel.” He leaves out Lombardi's name. At this point, Dan is relatively sure that the worst thing Lombardi did was get a Nuvarin employee pregnant at the wrong time. It was possible he had more to do with everything than they thought, but his indiscretions were the least of their problems. They knew where he was; it wasn't easy for an elected official to go into hiding if he thought there were wolves nipping at his heels unless he claimed a sudden illness or foisted one onto an unsuspecting member of his family and then resigned but Dan couldn't imagine Lombardi going down that road. He already refused to leave his seat when he was being investigated the first time. Why would he do it now? If they're really lucky, the guy was currently completely oblivious as to what Dan and Jonah were doing and he'd stay that way, at least for awhile.

“Oh,” she says. “I see. I'm not sure what I can do to help you. They were very kind to me when Ronald first disappeared, although we've lost contact since then. I still get sent a Christmas card, though. Never met his brother... Eric, you said?” Dan can hear the sound of fingers clicking on a keyboard and the clatter of what was probably a tea cup on a dish.

“What about Amanda Stafford?” Jonah suggests and there's a moments pause on the other end of the line.

“Hmm. No. I'm sorry.”

“That's alright,” Dan says, even though it really wasn't. He wasn't kidding when he told Jonah about square one. If they got nothing out of this conversation, no new thread to grasp, they would be left with a handful of useless string and no easy way to connect them without trying to talk to Theodore Nagel himself, something that was likely impossible before but even more so now after the stunt Jonah pulled at Nuvarin yesterday. “Did he ever talk about his work with you at all?”

“Not really. Not out of keeping secrets, mind you,” she says, almost laughing, “More because I found pharmaceuticals incredibly boring. In the days before...” She hesitates, let's out a small cough. “He seemed wary about something they had discovered. Told me it would change everything but that he couldn't explain it to me, not yet. And then... well, I never did find out what it was. I suppose it must not have been as impressive as he said.”

“Why do you say that?” Dan asks.

“Because I haven't heard anything, have you? Nothing as life-altering as Ronnie made it sound, at least.” Dan and Jonah share a meaningful look. Dan watched Jonah's video enough times last night to be able to bring up each detail of it in his head without much effort, can hear the screeches it made, see the shadows and the curve of it's back and he swallows, exhales through his nose. It's not an alien, he thinks to himself.

“Do you still have anything from Nuvarin?”

“Like what?”

“Anything he brought home. Folders or important documents—”

“He wasn't allowed,” she says quickly, as if the words were programmed into her head and Dan furrows his brow, is about to thank her for her time and then hit his head against the steering wheel a few times when she says: “Of course, that didn't stop him from bringing work home every Friday. He had the weekend off but he never really did, if you understand. The police asked about it as well at the time but I denied it existed. I wasn't sure how much trouble we'd both be in if Teddy found out Ronnie had been bringing things home and that he had allowed a non-employee to read something that was proprietary. Teddy could be— Well, anyway. I still have most of it stored away in my basement. It's only one box.”

“Do you think we could come look through it?” Dan asks and she laughs again.

“You'd fly all the way out here just to go through a box of old Nuvarin documents? You're very committed to this story, aren't you?”

“Hold on, what do you mean 'fly'?” Dan queries, a sick feeling like he was Wile E. Coyote who just ran off the edge of a cliff and was currently hovering and scrabbling in mid-air right over a long drop.

“You didn't know? I moved back to live closer to my parents and my sister. I tried to stay in that house for as long as possible, just in case he came back and I'd still— But I couldn't stand it for very much longer. It was too lonely. I'm in Jackson, Missouri now.” Wave at the camera, the cartoon whistle of a body falling from a great height and he lands in a cloud of dust on the ground. “I could package it up and send it to you, though, if you'd like. I have no use for any of it and I suppose it would do better to be in your hands than mine. I'm probably already in enough trouble for taking it with me. Might as well make it worse.”

They silently fight over it but, in the end, Jonah gives her the address to his own apartment and Dan half-heartedly insists on paying for any shipping costs but she dismisses him, says that it's the least she can do to help them on their way and thanks them for what they're doing. After they hang up, Dan sits back, hands clenching and unclenching the wheel as he thinks. There could be the answers to everything in that box, but they won't know until a week from now, unless she pays the exorbitant amount necessary to get it there by tomorrow. Until then, though, he had no idea what their next move should be.

\- -

They're sitting at a stop light, ready to turn onto the highway, when Dan notices Jonah staring into his side mirror and then nervously peering over his shoulder out of the back window. Dan had been aware of this since they pulled out of the strip mall parking lot, but this is the first time he finally decided to acknowledge it, simply because he was sure that Jonah wouldn't stop until he did.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I think we're being followed,” Jonah says quietly and Dan closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“For crying out loud,” Dan says. “We're not being fucking followed.”

“How do you know?” Jonah asks. “You've just been staring forward the whole time—as you fucking should be—but still. There's a black car that's been behind us for almost twenty minutes.”

“Twenty whole minutes?!” Dan replies with mock astonishment and he watches out of the corner of his eye as Jonah takes an awkward picture and then sits back to show it to Dan but he can only get a brief look at it because the light switches to green and he's driving again. He can't focus with Jonah's hand wavering just near his blind spot and he grabs at the phone, snatching it away. “Give me that.” He examines it, makes sure to only look for a few seconds before staring back at the road but they're on a long stretch, at least another twenty-five minutes or until he reaches the exit back into the city and all of the other vehicles in front of him were far enough away that, if he had to stop suddenly, there'd be time before a potential collision. This wasn't the first (nor the last) time Dan would use his phone while behind the wheel and nothing bad has happened to him yet. There's a white sedan just behind them and then, behind that, was a black SUV, which Dan assumed was the car Jonah had been referring to and he snorts, tossing the phone back towards Jonah's general direction, laughing again as he fumbles to catch it. Dan glances in the rearview mirror, sees the vehicle still there, keeping it's distance and leaving a large gap between them when the sedan shifts to the right lane, allowing a minivan to take the now empty spot. It seems strange now, but that's only because he's got Jonah's wriggling paranoia burrowing into his rational mind. “They're not following us,” Dan says, but he's not sure if he's saying it more to Jonah or himself.

“Take this exit,” Jonah says, points at a road sign that's telling them there's a rest stop just a quarter mile ahead if they have to use a bathroom or maybe want to eat some greasy fast food.

“I'm not doing that.” He knows what Jonah's trying to do: take the wrong way, see if the car goes with them. If it does, it means he's right and, if it doesn't, then Dan can be smug and pick on Jonah for it for the rest of the day. Of course, if they are being followed, whoever is driving probably knows what they're doing and might just keep going, figure they've been found out and call the whole thing off. Dan drives past the exit, mostly because he was too lost in thought and missed it but he plays it off as exactly what he wanted to do in the first place. “Here, look,” Dan says, flicks on the turn signal and shifts into the left-hand lane, speeds up to get a few more cars between them and the SUV and then shifts back into the center lane. “See?” It's not visible any longer, lost behind the cluster of vehicles that Dan had put himself in the middle of, almost like a protective wall of moving metal. “You're just being—” He starts but then Jonah is hitting him on the arm with a closed fist and pointing and Dan looks into the mirror and then out a window and there it is, their shadow, just a couple cars behind them again. He finds a space to drive into the right lane and slows down; the SUV moves into the left and slows down even more. “Okay,” Dan says, clearing his throat weakly and pulling on his tie, loosening it just slightly. “Someone might be following us.”

Dan feels trapped. He has no idea what he was supposed to do next. Finding out that someone was very possibly tailing him wasn't a particularly common occurrence for him and was something he figured only happened to journalists in works of fiction to up the drama during a lull in the plot but here he was, with a very black vehicle driven by an unknown figure and far too many minutes until they got to the city. If they didn't know where Dan or Jonah lived, they were certainly going to find out so Dan does the only thing he could think of: he slowly drifts right until he's pulled onto the side of the road and then stops, holding his foot on the brake and then turning off the engine. They watch as the vehicle slows down and then increases speed, vanishing further up the road. Dan hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath until he feels it in his chest and he let's it out, turns to look at Jonah who was already staring at him.

“What the fuck, dude,” Jonah says. “They were like a goddamn ghost.” Who knew how long they'd been following them for, Dan figures. They could have been behind them since they left Nuvarin yesterday and Jonah only noticed now because they fucked something up and made one awkward move. There's a voice in the back of Dan's head that's still telling him that Jonah was just being overly sensitive, that there was a reasonable explanation to what that car was doing and it had absolutely nothing to do with them but Dan also knew at some point that he was going to have to completely accept the fact that things were absolutely beyond his attempt at simple justification.

“They're gone now,” Dan says, “We'll just... head back into the city. Maybe we can get more out of Amy about the Nagels. I'm pretty sure she's—” He's interrupted by Jonah's phone—his main one—beeping, signaling to him that he's gotten a new text message and Jonah checks it, his jaw dropping, eyes widening. “What is it?” Jonah shows him.

 _Give us the video._ Nothing else, just those four words.

“Ignore it,” Dan tells him, his throat suddenly bone dry, his hands beginning to shake. The phone beeps again and it's the same message.

“Fuck them,” Jonah says with as much courage as he can seem to muster. “They're just trying to scare us. If they knew we had it, they'd come and fucking get it. Bunch of fucking cowards,” he says, starts to type a response but Dan smacks his hands, makes him drop the phone at his feet.

“Don't,” Dan says and Jonah wrinkles his nose at him and, as he's leaning down to pick the phone back up, they hear another one ringing and it takes a moment for Dan to realize that it's his and not Jonah's. The two of them make eye contact before simultaneously turning to stare at the bag in the backseat.

“You're not gonna answer it?”

“No,” Dan says, facing forward. It stops and there's a short pause before it starts to ring again.

“Dan...”

“Jonah, don't you dare—” They both move towards the back at the same time but Jonah manages to get his seatbelt off and reach back there first, his arms longer than Dan's and Dan winds up nearly choking himself on his own seatbelt in his struggle to grab at his bag. He's still fighting him, whacking childishly at wherever he can reach but his phone is out and in Jonah's right hand. His thumb presses down on the green button and he puts it close to his ear, leaning slightly to the side to get as far away from Dan as possible without actively getting out of the car. Dan finally stops, waits and listens.

“Hey asshole,” Jonah yells suddenly, pointing for emphasis with a finger even though the person on the other end can't see him. “We don't have any video, alright? We don't know what you're talking about. Now if you don't quit harassing us, we'll make you wish that you did.” He hangs up without another word and looks victorious, but his expression shifts slowly to doubt when he turns to Dan and sees the horrified expression on his face. “What?”

“'We'll make you wish that you did?' Are you a black belt in karate and you just forgot to mention that?”

“Believe me,” Jonah says, “If I was, you'd know. Everyone would know. They won't do anything to us. Like I said: they're just trying to scare us.” Dan has to give him credit: despite his nerves only a few minutes before, Jonah is doing his best to put on a brave face. The guy had a remarkable ability to find a way to bounce back from being unbelievably shaken, even if it was merely temporary. Dan was only good at faking it.

“Put my phone back where you found it,” Dan says, starting the car. “And put your fucking seatbelt on.”

\- -

There aren't a lot of people on the floor that Dan worked on and he has to stop in his tracks more than once to double back and physically yank Jonah by the sleeve through the open space where other writers researched and typed quickly, fingers flying. He had wanted to keep Jonah as far away from here as possible but he knew he wouldn't be able to get away with making Jonah wait for him in the parking lot for a second time so he felt he had no choice but to drag him along like a small child for which he couldn't find a babysitter. He'd told Jonah not to talk to anybody, not to bother them, to treat this as if he were in a museum and Dan leads him past co-workers (some who acknowledge him, most who don't) and towards where Amy worked, surprised—but grateful—to see her sitting at her desk.

Dan says her name as they approach, pushes it out like a breath of air between his teeth and then says it louder with a very audible whisper and she finally spins around, looks at the two of them, first frowning and then eyeing them curiously.

“You guys look spooked,” she says, following it up with a “Hey!” when Dan grabs her by the arm, hauls her from her chair and begins leading both her and Jonah towards the thankfully empty conference room, waiting for the door to close completely before making any more sounds. The room is far from the complete privacy that he wants, but it's better than nothing and, as long as they keep their voices low, all anybody outside the room would see was the equivalent to a non-captioned silent film. Dan lifts his bag off from across his chest and thuds it down on the long, dark polished wooden table, rubbing his hands over his face. “What the fuck is going on with you two?”

“I'm going to tell you something and I want you to just listen, okay? Don't ask any stupid questions. Just let me talk,” Dan says and Amy looks back and forth between them, utterly perplexed.

“Uh... okay.”

“Jonah and I went to Nuvarin yesterday,” he starts and she puts up a hand, opens her mouth but then closes it again and waits. “Jonah decided to sneak off and he saw something. He got the whole thing on video and we got out of there.” He pauses, swallows, and Amy blinks at him, raises an eyebrow.

“Is... Is that it or...?”

“We went to talk to someone today and we were driving back into the city and someone was following us.”

“Following you?” She's doing exactly what he told her not to, but he honestly couldn't have expected her to do any different so he lets it slide. Amy looks to Jonah as if she thinks Dan might be having a psychotic break and that Jonah needed help but Jonah nods at her instead, confirming what Dan was saying. He takes out his phone and brings up the most recent messages and shows them to her and she studies it for a moment before staring at the both of them again. “Are you serious?” Jonah nods again.

“They called my phone. Jonah answered, went all macho man on them before hanging up,” Dan says and Amy hands Jonah's phone back to him.

“What'd they say? When they called.”

“That they wanted the video,” Jonah tells her but trails off awkwardly at the end as if there was more that he wasn't allowing himself to say and he glances at his feet, kicks at the carpet with his heel.

“What else did they say?” Dan asks slowly.

“Hm? What?” Jonah looks up at him, lips pulled tight together for a moment. “Nothing. Nothing else.”

“You're a shitty liar, Jonah Ryan,” Dan says, taking a (hopefully) menacing step forward. “What else?” Jonah looks to Amy but she's not going to side with him on anything and she sets her bottom jaw forward just a bit, a sign Dan knows that means she's not in the mood for playing games and if he didn't spill in the next few seconds, she'd find a way to make him. It should have been her shouting threats to the nameless people on the other end of the phone; at least they would have been credible.

“They knew we had it. That this was them being nice,” Jonah says feebly, “And that if we didn't cooperate things were going to get a lot more complicated.”

“Great. And you told them to basically go fuck themselves,” Dan says with barely contained anger.

“What,” Jonah says, spreading his arms out horizontally, palms flat and facing up towards the ceiling, “You would've just given it to them?”

“Of course not!” Dan shouts. Surrendering it might have been an option yesterday, when Dan was one-hundred percent convinced it was garbage, that whatever it was was just some trashy prank played on a couple of nosy journalists but if that's what it really was, the people of Nuvarin wouldn't be suddenly working so damn hard to get it back. He still refuses to believe it was something alien, but he was definitely beginning to accept the fact that it was something viciously damaging. Maybe it was a side effect gone horribly wrong, maybe this was what happened when someone took Emyxril and they were still trying to get in on the market in the next few months. Either way, the last place that video was going to end up was in their hands but the fact that they threatened that things were going to get complicated and that tailing them and contacting them out of the blue on phones that neither Dan nor Jonah had actively given them the numbers to was considered them “being nice” was certainly not putting Dan at ease. Jonah informing him that he came at them with false bravado instead of simply hanging up wasn't helping much either.

“Okay, okay,” Amy is saying. “Relax, alright? This isn't the first time a corporation has thrown a hissy fit when one of us has gotten something on camera that we weren't supposed to and it won't be the last time. Unless they have solid proof you have the video, they can't do jack shit for now. It's nothing but empty threats.” Dan lets her words sink in as he takes a few deep breaths. She's right. They're baiting them, trying to force them to admit to having it. If they knew, if they had surveillance of their own, they could just show up on Jonah or Dan's doorstep with a lawyer and a piece of paper ordering them to hand it over. Dan would still probably deny having it (and he can assume that Jonah would do the same) but it would be an entirely different scenario. “Do you have it with you?” She asks and Dan glances at his bag, two other pairs of eyes staring at it carefully as well.

\- -

Dan doesn't know why he agrees to show it to her. Just this morning, if someone had suggested letting anybody else but him and Jonah watch it, he would have had a hearty laugh at their expense but there are very few people in this world that he trusts and she's surprisingly close to the top of the list.

She's sitting in one of the conference room chairs facing out towards the rest of the floor so her back wasn't to the world, so nobody else could try mashing their faces against the glass wall and try to look over her shoulder, and her elbows are propped up on the table, Jonah's second phone held in both of her hands. Dan and Jonah were seated on either side of her and all three of their heads were bent forward enough that if they moved even a couple centimeters closer, they'd be touching.

Amy is silent for a good two minutes after it ends and then she uses the tip of her index finger to rewind the video and watch it for a second time.

“What the hell was that?” She asks quietly after she pauses it, leaving an image of the figure with a hand pressed against the window frozen on the screen.

“It's a fucking extraterrestrial,” Jonah says and Amy makes a face at that but doesn't look at him, keeps her eyes fixed on the paused video instead.

“It's not an alien, Jonah,” Dan says over the top of Amy's head and Jonah grimaces at him, his arm stretched over the back of Amy's chair.

“Then what is it exactly?”

“It's...” Dan gestures wildly with an outstretched arm, searching for the right word, and then points towards the phone. “It's not an alien!”

“It's not an alien,” Amy says and Dan smiles at Jonah, whose grimace deepens. “I couldn't tell you what the fuck I'm looking at but it can't be an alien.”

“You two,” Jonah says, standing up and using his index and middle fingers to point at both Dan and Amy, “Are way too closed minded. You say it's not an alien but you can't tell me what the fuck it is either.”

“I'm closed minded?!” Dan responds heatedly, uncurling from his crouched position to face Jonah. “You're the one who's absolutely refusing to budge on this alien bullshit!”

“For the love of God,” Amy says, just loudly enough to get their attention. “Shut up. Both of you just shut your mouths for a second, okay? Look, I don't know what this thing you showed me is. It's obviously not some stupid prank or they wouldn't be trying to get it back but I highly, highly doubt this is proof that ET is on our planet and he's some mean motherfucker being holed up in a pharmaceutical company. Go fill your chill pill prescriptions and figure this shit out.” She rises to her feet and goes to hand the phone back to Dan but he pushes her hand away and back towards her chest. He glances at Jonah, is unsettled to see that Jonah can already wordlessly understand him, but he doesn't protest like he was expecting.

“I think you should hold onto it,” Dan says and Amy stares at him, first amused and then almost comically serious and she shakes her head, laughing.

“Oh no. No, no, no. I don't want to get any more involved in this. And don't you try to give me some kind of 'in case something happens to me' speech. We're not in a fucking movie.” She tries to give it back to him but, once again, Dan pushes it back.

“I'm not asking you to do anything but keep it. Put it in your desk or under your mattress, I don't care. I'll owe you a favor. We'll owe you a favor,” he says and Amy narrows her eyes. “An enormous one.” Dan hates owing people favors but it'll be worth it to keep this video somewhere relatively safe.

“Fine,” Amy says after about thirty seconds of prolonged silence. “But if men in black suits and dark sunglasses come knocking at my door, I can't promise you anything.” To anyone else, it would sound like she meant it, that if any sort of authority came for her that she would willingly and easily hand the video over without much question but Dan knew otherwise, knew that she was making sure Dan thought she didn't give two shits about him (or Jonah) one way or another and that she was only doing this because she couldn't stand to listen to him whine at her for much longer. If she really didn't want to do it, she would have jammed the phone down his throat just to get him to take it back. “Is there anything else or can I go back to work?”

“Yeah, actually,” Dan says, sitting back down and Amy rolls her eyes.

\- -

Amy doesn't reveal much of anything new about either Theodore or Eric, despite her insisting that she wasn't keeping anything particularly juicy from them. She does give them the number for Theodore's personal assistant, something she had held onto “just in case” but tells them that the likelihood of getting even a few minutes of his time was a pointless venture, so she wasn't sure why she even bothered.

“You'd be better off stalking him outside the office building he spends a couple of days a week in and hope to stop him before he leaves. Although, I once waited for him all afternoon only to find out he had 'stepped out' for lunch and never came back. It amazes me,” she said, “How assholes like that can run a fucking company. But like I told you earlier: the guy isn't in the mood to talk to strangers.”

Dan doesn't want her to be right but he knows she is; in situations like this, guys like Theodore would, best case, bring them in for a string of rehearsed statements pre-approved by an army of clone-like lawyers that would sound, at first, like the answers they were looking for but would later turn out to be nothing but a sieve: more holes than anything else. Besides that, if he knew about what Jonah had on that phone (he must, unless there was some nameless second-party involved to handle these types of situations, to keep them quiet and as low down on the totem pole as possible), he could dangle the threat of trespassing charges over their heads, push all sorts of complicated corporate crimes down their throats until they were left debating if a few months in jail was even worth it for a few words on a page that might not have any true meaning in the end.

“Fine,” Dan says, more to the nagging voice in his head than anyone else, once both he and Jonah are back down to where he parked, “Then we'll just have to come up with something else.” What they need is to find something so damn big that everyone involved in Nuvarin from the secretary to the CEO will have no option but to respond with even a pinch of honesty. That place is a rusty can with a tightly sealed lid and instead of continuing to stab at it with a fork, Dan needs to come back with a four-hundred dollar electric can opener.

\- -

Somehow, they wind up back at Jonah's place, sitting next to each other on the couch, Jonah with his feet pressed up against the edge of the coffee table, knees bent with his computer on his lap and Dan with his arms resting on his thighs as he leans forward and stares at the screen on his own laptop, set steadily on the table in front of them. Amy had never found out where exactly Eric Nagel had worked before shipping himself back to the east coast, and she had found it odd, but hadn't been able to tell if it was something that had been wiped clean before or after he had disappeared.

Dan wasn't having much luck either, unsurprisingly, even though part of him had hoped that he would manage to discover what he needed in less than an hour, just so he could call Amy and gloat about it. Jonah had been oddly quiet since they left the _Leviathan_ offices and Dan wasn't sure if it was because he was lost in thought (doubtful) or if he was still angry at Dan for not agreeing with him about that shadowy figure being an alien.

“Anything?” He asks and Jonah shrugs one shoulder, making a noncommittal noise. “Jesus, come on, Jonah. Will you please stop acting like a child for five seconds and—” Dan is interrupted when Jonah turns the screen towards him and starts playing a video from YouTube, tapping the mouse to bring it into fullscreen. Dan watches as Eric Nagel blandly explains a complicated procedure for dealing with blood clots and he's so focused on his own irritation that Jonah seemed to have a supernatural ability for finding things that he almost misses exactly what Jonah was trying to show him in the first place. Forget the boring speech: in the bottom left of the video, right under his name, emblazoned with white capital letters, is the name of the hospital that he worked in. “How the hell do you do that?”

“Just gotta know where to look,” Jonah replies, sounding far too pleased with himself. “You'd be amazed at what kind of shit I can dig up. I could find all your buried secrets, like that.” Jonah attempts to snap his fingers, but it doesn't work particularly well and instead just sounds exactly like you'd imagine two fingers rubbing quickly together. Dan snorts and stands up, wandering towards where Jonah said the bathroom was the first time he was there, already going over in his head what he was going to ask whomever was on the other line of the phone when he called the hospital.

When he comes back out a few minutes later, he finds Jonah sitting in his seat, leaning over to snoop around on his unattended computer and he's about to yell at him, to say that he had a chance to go through Jonah's phone the day before but he didn't and this is the thanks he gets, but Jonah is lifting his head and staring at him with a muffled sort of fury and Dan feels a flush of heat go up his neck when Jonah spins the laptop around and Dan sees the video he had copied over paused and waiting to be played, hovering over the folder with the screen shots he had taken.

“What happened to 'no copies'?” Jonah asks.

“I said you couldn't make copies,” Dan says. “Remember the whole 'I don't trust you' thing? The first thing you wanted to do was post it on the internet. It's been on my laptop since last night and has it gone up online? No.”

“I can't fucking believe you.”

“ _You_ can't believe _me_? Do you ever even _consider_ the consequences of what you want to do or do you just do them and let Lady Fucking Luck lead you blindly the rest of the way? If this is how you've always done things, I'm not surprised that the furthest you've made as a journalist is creating your own crappy website that people visit just for the sheer schadenfreude!”

“You're not fucking better than me, Dan,” Jonah says and he stands up, possibly hoping to use his height as a way to intimidate him but he manages to hit his shin on the edge of the coffee table and trip forward and in the exact moment that his head is below the window behind him, the glass shatters and a buzzing noise like a fly that had been flung from a slingshot goes right through the space he had left behind, to explode into the wall Dan was standing in front of and, for a moment, neither of them speak. Dan slowly turns to look over his shoulder at the clean bullet hole now tarnishing the pale green paint, plaster dust and splinters on the floor and Jonah looks to the same place and then behind him at the glass scattered on his couch. “Did... Did someone just...?” But Jonah can't finish his question because the fact that he even as to ask it is seemingly too unbelievable and Dan feels his palms start to sweat, his heart jack-hammering in his chest and another shot comes sailing through the now open window, just an inch or two closer to where Dan is standing only to once again find a new home in the wall. “We gotta go,” Jonah is saying. “We've gotta get the fuck out of here!”

Jonah is moving, keeps his head down and pulls on Dan's arm to get him to stop just standing there but Dan wrenches out of his grip, at least making sure to move away from the general line of fire into the kitchen area and gestures back towards the couch where his bag and computer were still sitting, waiting.

“I can't leave without—” He starts to say to Jonah, who's crouched down by the cabinets under his sink and Jonah stares up at him, open-mouthed.

“Are you fucking kidding me? _Forget your shit_. We're being shot at.” Dan knows, he's acutely aware of that fact, but his panic and anxiety is mixing with adrenaline, it's scrambling his brains to the point where all he can think about is the fact that him leaving his things behind to flee might be exactly what whomever is shooting at them wants. Maybe they're not even trying to hurt them; maybe they just want them to run.

“I'm getting my bag,” Dan says because he needs that at least. Both of his phones are in there, his car and house keys, as well as notes and research for this story. Without any of that, all he has left to rely on until they can come back here (if that's even an option) is Jonah. He tries to make a dash for it, but there's another bullet waiting and this time it slams into his laptop which Jonah had left open on the table and he yells, puts his arms to his head and drops to the ground, crawling back over to where Jonah is now sitting, knees bent and pulled close to himself.

“Are you—” Jonah begins to ask, touches his arm, but Dan brushes him off with a shaking hand. “This is fucked up,” he says, peering around Dan at the now destroyed computer and Dan looks at it as well with a pained expression. He's got most of his important information stored in the Cloud but it still fucking hurt to see that piece of technology destroyed.

“I'm going to try one more time,” Dan says and he feels like he's going to throw up, the world around him looks brighter than it was supposed to and he feels like he's losing it but all he wants is his bag, that's it. He lowers himself to his stomach and uses his arms to propel himself forward, dragging his body along Jonah's dirty floor and the silence is making his ears ring, the anticipation making him hold his shallow breath and he reaches over towards where the black mound is next to the leg of the table and he grasps the strap, reeling it in towards himself like a fish on a tight line.

“Can we please go now?” Jonah shouts.

“Yes,” Dan responds and the two of them make a break for it, opening the apartment door and speeding down the hallway, taking the stairs two at a time until they burst out into the grey early afternoon clouds and they freeze, both looking in different directions, trying to decide where to go while simultaneously looking to see if they could spot an obvious figure with a gun pointed at their heads but there's nothing but buildings and people walking, cars and taxis rolling leisurely down the road. In the very back of his head, Dan knows that it's a bad idea, but he makes a beeline for where he parked his car and he can hear Jonah following, large feet thudding against the pavement behind him. He fumbles with the key fob, the lights flashing to signal the fact that it's unlocked but then he hesitates, hands spread apart as he stares down at them. They look like they're about a million miles away and he swallows. “I can't drive,” he says entirely matter-of-factly and Jonah is next to him, snatching the keys from his fingers and telling him to _get in the car goddamn it_ , which Dan finally does, climbing into the backseat since walking around to the passenger side would take too much time and effort.

Jonah says something about Dan having short legs and pushes his seat back far enough to accommodate his length and he pulls easily out into an open space in the minimal traffic and, obeying as many laws as possible, they make their gradual getaway.

\- -

Eventually, Jonah pulls down a narrow street, somehow miraculously finds an empty space in front of a long stretch of houses, and he shuts off the engine. Dan can hear him breathing heavily but it's a surprise that he can even hear anything at all with the way his blood is rushing in his own ears and he clings to his bag as if it were a shield.

“What the fuck,” Jonah says finally and then, louder: “ _What the fuck_.”

“I'm asleep,” Dan says. “I have to be asleep.”

“If you're asleep, then this is a really fucked up dream,” Jonah replies. Being followed and contacted on the phone was one thing but to have it escalate to gunfire so quickly afterwards... What was it Jonah told them the man on the phone had said? If they didn't cooperate, things were going to get a lot more complicated. Dan had figured that had meant legal action, not possible attempted murder. “Oh my god. This is simultaneously the worst and best day of my life,” Jonah says and Dan's head snaps up and he shoots forward, grabbing the back of Jonah's seat.

“'Best'? I'm sorry, did you just saying 'the best'?”

“I've never been shot at because of a story before,” Jonah says, laughing with a maniacal sort of glee and Dan may be the one once again tap dancing around the edges of a panic attack but Jonah might have completely snapped. “This means what we found is serious. I mean, nobody's going to try and blow the heads off a couple of journalists because they got video of a guy in a rubber suit.” Dan feels positive that the last bit was directed specifically at him because of his unwavering position in believing that the male-shaped figure wasn't an alien and Dan wants to tell him that he at least stopped trying to convince himself that it was a ridiculously convoluted prank set upon them by bored Nuvarin employees but he decides to just let it slide for the moment, which goes against everything he's ever stood for in his life. “I think I'm going to barf,” Jonah says and, for a few seconds, he really does seem like he's actually going to and Dan's prepared to do whatever it took to make sure none of that vomit winds up anywhere inside the vehicle but then Jonah shakes his head and inhales slowly. “Nevermind.”

Dan sits back again and puts his head in his hands, elbows pressed hard into his thighs, studying the grit and swirls in the rough carpet at the bottom of his car. Where were they supposed to go from here? This isn't the sort of thing they teach professional journalists how to handle unless they're planning to become one of those people who travel to foreign countries currently in the middle of war and then, maybe, they get a seminar or two on how to compose yourself while being shot at while driving sixty miles per hour down a dirt road. This was unfamiliar territory, which made him feel even worse. He hated being unprepared and, since taking on this story and working with Jonah, it's been one unpredictable and unusual experience right after the other and it's only one in the afternoon on day two. All he wants is to go home, but he knows he'd most likely be equally as vulnerable there as they had been at Jonah's apartment. Even if they don't know where he lives, they might still be behind them, following, and the last thing Dan is inclined to do is to lead the bad guys right to his front door.

“We have to go back to _The Leviathan_ ,” Dan says quietly and then picks his head up, repeating himself so Jonah can hear.

“What? Why?”

“They won't shoot up a whole building just because of us. It's the safest place we can be right now that isn't a police station.” At least, he hopes that's true.

\- -

The police, Dan knows, should be involved. It doesn't matter why they're being shot at or followed. The fact that either of those things are happening at all is enough cause for concern but the thought of actually going through with making the call or showing up in a station is giving him major pause. What were they supposed to tell them exactly? 'Yesterday, my colleague technically trespassed and filmed some strange activity in the Nuvarin building and now, today, we are being threatened to hand the most likely illegally obtained video over to, whom we can only assume, are people involved in the company'. And then what? All they had were the text messages on Jonah's phone and the received call on Dan's. There was no proof that the black SUV, who's license plate number they never got (the photo Jonah had sloppily taken of it had accidentally cropped it out, just barely out of frame and neither of them had looked at it for long enough to memorize it, too busy trying to figure out who was behind the wheel), was indeed following them other than what they saw combined with possible mounting paranoia. The gunfire was real, there were bullet holes, no doubt there, still perfectly formed in the wall and Dan's laptop, the window broken, but who's to say that it was indeed targeted at them and not some accidental misfire from a separate crime somewhere close by? The lack of panic from passersby meant that nobody had even heard it. Those shots could have come from miles away.

For all Dan could guess, they might lead the police back to Jonah's apartment only to find it entirely clean. They'd get a few disparaging or sympathetic looks, told that there was nothing much that could be done and to call again if they notice anything else, which was cop talk for “let us know if one of you gets shot and then we'll be able to do something”. Dan had never been in a situation like this before. The closest he's ever gotten to dealing with the police is the couple times he was pulled over for speeding, once when he was in high school and a young officer had come to give a talk to his class about drugs, and the few scattered times he's had to ask one or two of them generic questions for an article he had been assigned to back when he had no choice in what he got to write. But Dan reads, stays on top of all the most important news sites and even a few he'd be too embarrassed to admit he's subscribed to, and he doesn't miss the stories where someone was being stalked or endangered but shoved to the side because the only damage done so far was psychological and what could they do with that?

He had enough trust in the authorities to handle these types of problems as they happened but now that he was experiencing it first-hand, he wasn't entirely sure what would be best for either him or Jonah at this point.

Besides, as gross as it was to say it: Jonah had a point. Nobody would be willing to shoot at them unless what they had was life-changing, not just for Nuvarin as a company but for the rest of the country (maybe even the rest of the world). Alien or not, whatever that thing was was worth the use of violence to get evidence of it existing back into what they most likely considered to be the “right hands”. It meant that they were hiking up the right path and it would only be a matter of time before they reached the very top of the wretched mountain.

\- -

Amy definitely appears surprised to see them back again but there must have been some obvious signs of distress on their faces because she herds them over to her, stealing the chairs from Gary's desk next to her own since he hadn't come into work yet that afternoon and both Dan and Jonah sit down heavily. Amy sits in front of them, arms crossed, waiting, as if Dan didn't work there and had no right to show up whenever he pleased but there's a barely noticeable crease in her brow that showed her concern.

“Did you guys forget something or did you just want to bother me some more? Your precious video is right here,” she says, unlocking the bottom drawer with a key and opening it to show them, gesturing like a model showing off a fancy new product to a bored crowd. She closes it with a careful push with her toes and shrugs. “So there you go. Nobody got to it within the hour or so you've been gone.” She's just talking to fill the dead air, they all know it, and she sighs, drumming her fingers on her leg. “I really do have shit to do, you know. I'm actually just about to head out, I've got a meeting with some low tier government employee...” She trails off, tries not to give too much more away but Dan shrugs and rubs a hand over his face. He feels like he's currently floating in a rowboat that had a hole in the bottom barely bigger than the head of a needle out in the middle of the ocean. He could ignore it for awhile, keep his head up and stay afloat but, eventually, he was going to start taking on some serious water and have to face the problem before he drowns. For now, any kind of work would be a welcome distraction. It wouldn't necessarily put him at ease, but it would be enough to keep him from completely capsizing.

“That's fine. We're just going to get some work done here, alright?”

“Use your own damn desk,” Amy says, frowning.

“It's too close to the windows,” Jonah says, moving back slightly when Amy turns to glance at him as if her gaze was physically attacking him. Dan had had a talk with Jonah before they stepped out of the car and into the building, making him promise that he wouldn't tell her anything about what had happened after they left earlier, that the less she knew the better off she would be in the long run and Jonah had argued (of course, since that was pretty much what his default setting was when Dan tried to tell him what to do) but, eventually, had relented. What he had said here was just enough of the truth without entirely breaking the promise he had made to Dan literally less than five minutes ago and, luckily for them both, Amy chose to treat it as Jonah being his usual odd Jonah self and let it go.

“Right. Well, fine. Don't snoop through my things,” Amy says, standing up to pull on her coat and drape the heavy strap to her purse over her shoulder, stepping through the space left between Dan and Jonah's chairs. “Don't use my computer.”

“I don't have mine with me,” Dan says, holds his hands out, and Amy's frown deepens.

“Why not?”

“It broke,” Dan says.

“Great. Just great. Hold on.” She comes back, leans over her keyboard and logs out of her password-protected account, pulling open a blank, anonymous user account instead, the screen shifting from her personal desktop to the bland wallpaper that came with the computer. “There. Internet. Basic text program. Everything you need. Can I go now?” She doesn't wait for an answer and marches away towards the elevator.

Neither Dan nor Jonah move for a brief moment, taking in their surroundings, examining the floor, listening to the other people around them typing and murmuring to each other, themselves, or someone on the phone. Behind a closed door just a few feet away, Dan can hear Kent having an escalating argument with someone and it's strangely comforting. He gets up and lowers himself down in Amy's chair, grabbing onto the edge of her desk and pulling himself forward.

“You think you can find that video with Eric in it again?” Dan asks and Jonah coughs, wheeling himself to his side and pulling the keyboard into his lap.

\- -

It takes Jonah fifteen minutes to trawl through YouTube and find the same video and Dan takes the keyboard from him and takes even less time to find the hospital's website, looking through menus and categories on their page before discovering their 'Contact Us' link which gave them a lengthy list of what they deemed 'Frequently Used Numbers', which offered him such options as Billing and Pre-Admission Testing. Dan figures their best bet would be with the occasionally uncooperative human resources and decides to use his second phone, leaving his main one sitting on Amy's desk, as if afraid it might turn into an explosive if he dared to actually use it to contact anyone involved with this story.

He's been sitting on hold, soft jazz filtering calmly into his ear when his other phone starts to ring and he stares at it nervously while Jonah cranes his neck forward before reaching over to pick it up.

“It's Amy,” he says and Dan tells him to answer it. “Dan's pho— Oh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. Hold... Hold on.” He pulls it away from his ear, covers the receiver and turns to Dan. “She says she needs you to find something in the bottom left-side drawer.”

“Tell her I'm not her fucking secretary.”

“Dan says,” Jonah tells her without much hesitation, “He's not your fucking secretary.” A pause. “Bottom left, you said? Okay.” The keyboard is tossed down with an obnoxious clatter and Jonah stands, shuffling in a semi-circle around the back of Dan's chair before stopping at the left side of the desk, and he crouches unnervingly close to Dan's legs, nudging Dan just enough to let him know he needs him to move but all Dan does is scoot over barely an inch to the right. Jonah opens the drawer and begins rifling through the stack of papers and folders inside and Dan is so absent-mindedly mesmerized by his movements that he nearly misses when someone on the other end of the line finally speaks to him.

“Hello?” The voice is clear and flat, an annoyance creeping in as if they've been asking that for longer than they wanted to and Dan sits forward slightly and minimizes whatever Jonah had been looking up and brings up the empty text document, grabbing the keyboard with his free hand and settling it down close enough that he'll be able to type.

“Yeah, hi. I'm Dan Egan, I work for _The Leviathan_. It's a—”

“I know _The Leviathan_ ,” the young man says. “I read it online sometimes. How can I help you this afternoon, Mister Egan?” Dan could try to charm him for a few minutes but he isn't entirely sure he could toggle that switch today as easily as he could most other days so he decides that he'll get straight to the point (or to whatever vague sort of point he planned on using).

“We—” He starts, wavers, and back-tracks. “Sorry. I'm writing a story on the Nagels and it's come to light that Eric Nagel used to work at your hospital before he left to come back to the East Coast and I was just wondering if there was anything you could tell me about him. I know he said that he had left to 'stand by his brother's side' but was there something else going on?” He finishes and there's a strained stillness from the man and, for a few seconds, all Dan can hear is him breathing.

“One moment please,” the man says and before Dan has a chance to respond, he's put back on hold. By now, Jonah has found what Amy was looking for and he's sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of the open drawer with a folder stretched across the space, slowly reading her what seemed to be endless lines of minuscule text. He was using his finger, dragging it along under the sentences he was verbalizing for her, taking breaks to listen or wait for Amy to scribble down the basics of what he's telling her, most likely using a shorthand that she told Dan was taught to her by an unpleasant college professor who had thought her coming into his office after class was an invitation to something when all it was was her trying to get him to use real words to explain the homework he'd given them. During one of the lulls in his reading, Jonah looks up at Dan and Dan considers pretending he hadn't been staring but he shrugs one shoulder instead.

“Gave him the whole song and dance and he put me on hold again. I can't listen to this fucking music anymore,” Dan says suddenly, taking the phone away from his ear to put it face up on the desk, switching it briefly to speaker so he could hear when someone came back to speak to him, unless they were hoping they could keep him on hold long enough that he would just hang up out of sheer frustration. Joke's on them, though: Dan once sat on hold for three hours just to get Senator Danny Chung to answer one simple 'yes or no' question. He could wait for however long it took. He sits back and pushes the tips of his fingers against his temple, feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on. Most likely a combination of hunger and anxiety, but he'll settle for a shitty cup of coffee and, maybe, whatever he could scrounge from the cabinets or the fridge.

He leaves Jonah on the floor and takes his phone with him, luckily finding the break room empty so he wouldn't have to endure whatever sort of small talk someone might attempt to engage him in. Hot coffee is being poured in a (hopefully clean) mug that had been upturned next to the sink when the jazzy music stops and the young man from before clears his throat. Dan nearly drops the carafe and picks up his phone, swiping the screen with his thumb to turn it off 'speaker'.

“Mister Egan?” The man asks unsteadily, sounding as if he just had been yelled at for ten minutes by someone and had barely been given a chance to recover before being told to talk to Dan again.

“Yeah?”

“We can't help you.” Just like that, nothing further. He hangs up, leaving Dan standing there, open-mouthed and confused, which slowly creeps into anger.

“You've got to be fucking kidding me!” Dan laments loudly enough that a woman he didn't recognize walking past the open door hesitates, turning to stare at him with surprise, only to continue on her way when Dan scowls at her. He wanders back over to where Jonah is still on the floor but no longer on the phone and he's browsing casually through the rest of the drawer. He glances up at Dan when he sits down heavily and he sulks.

“You didn't get me any coffee.”

“You're not an invalid,” Dan snaps, throwing his phone down on the desk. “They can't help me.”

“What?”

“That's what he said. 'We can't help you'. And then he hung up on me.”

“You're joking,” Jonah says without a hint of sarcasm.

“I wish.” He nurses his head again and takes a careful sip from his mug, slouching in his chair, legs spread, and he watches Jonah perusing Amy's files and notes. “I'm going to tell her you're doing that.”

“No you won't,” Jonah replies without lifting his head, turning a page and then flipping it upside down.

“Wanna bet?” There's no warning to his tone, though, so Jonah keeps sorting through everything laid out in front of him. “Hey, where's my phone?” Dan asks after another minute of quiet between them and Jonah reaches blindly next to his knee, picking it up and holding it out, too engrossed in what he was looking at to put any effort into returning the device. “What did Amy want?”

“Just some bullshit legal nonsense.”

“Like what?”

“Fuck, Dan, I don't know. Here,” Jonah says, flips through what Dan assumes is his 'already read' pile and pulls out a folder, shoving it towards him. Dan considers commenting that Jonah better remember the correct order for all of this when he's done but maybe Amy won't notice. If she does, Dan has no problem throwing Jonah under the bus to escape Amy Brookheimer's wrath. It turns out to be something having to do with privacy law but Dan only manages to get halfway through the document before becoming bored (although, the connection between this and whichever government employee she was currently meeting with definitely piqued his interest in what story she was writing exactly. If he really was in the mood, he would sign into her account (he knew her password, had known it for months now when they all had to change them after a possible hacking incident and she had written down her new one on a post-it she thought she had stuck somewhere out-of-sight) and figure it out for himself, but he didn't want to risk it).

He's about to check his emails while he tries to figure out their next step when his second phone rings and he creases his brow, watches as Jonah lifts his head again and Dan slowly sits up, picking it up and staring at the screen. It's an unrecognizable number and the only people who would call him on this phone were already in his contact list but there's a small voice in his head that's telling him to answer the damn call, so he does, if only to shut it up.

“Hello? Dan Egan speak—”

“Mister Egan?” It's a woman and she sounds nervous, speaking just barely above a whisper. Dan acknowledges that she has the right person and she continues to talk. “I don't have a lot of time here so I'll just talk. I'm a nurse here at Saint Marie and I was down in HR when I overheard the guy in charge down there yelling at some kid who works the phones about who you had asked about. I know he told you he can't help and that's only mostly true. He can't help. But he wants to. I want to.” She takes in a shaky breath before progressing. “A lot of us here hated him. Guy was an asshole. Treated everyone that wasn't a doctor or a wealthy patient like garbage. Anything you want to know, ask me but make it quick. I'm kinda hiding out in a comatose patient's bathroom here.”

Dan is at a loss for words and if he believed in a higher power he would be thanking it right about now but, instead, he rolls his chair towards the computer, fingers hovering over the keyboard. Jonah looks at him imploringly from his spot on the floor, wanting to know what was going on, but Dan just shakes his head and holds up a finger.

“Anything. Anything you can tell me about him. I honestly don't care at this point,” Dan says, letting out a breathless laugh.

“Okay. Okay. Well, look. Like I said: guy was a jerk. But that's whatever, right? We all knew he was related to the Nuvarin Nagels but Eric never talked about his family, not even with a 'I come from money and you don't, I'm so much better than you' blah blah bullshit. I mean, he still acted like he was better than most of us but his family name never came into it. I was in the room when he got what turned out to be the call that Theodore had gotten the company. Eric was pissed. Threw a damn bedpan to the floor and then expected me to clean it up,” she says with a sigh and then hesitates as if she's holding her breath, listening to something else and then keeps going, her voice slightly quieter. “Anyways... It's why we all found it a little strange when one afternoon he says, a couple weeks after that whole investigation with his brother, he's going back to be 'by his side' or whatever.

"And besides, he'd been acting bizarre before that: taking less shifts, talking a lot to the head of oncology, Doctor Simmons. Long story short: some of us did some snooping, found out that Eric had cancer. Pretty bad stuff, too. Terminal.” She stops again and Dan had been silently listening, typing quickly, but freezes when she tells him, blinks at the computer screen and shifts his hand to hold the phone to his ear instead of cradled between his head and shoulder. He spins his chair to face Jonah, who had moved at some point back to his own seat beside him and kicks at his leg to get him to pay attention.

“Eric was sick? You sure?” Dan says it slowly and clearly, makes sure that Jonah understands and his eyes widen. He scoots forward and then to the side, leaning sideways towards where Dan was holding the phone to listen and Dan thinks about pushing him away, telling him that he'll explain the rest soon, he just wanted him to know that little tidbit but, instead, he adjusts the phone, pulling it just a bit away from his ear so Jonah can hear more easily.

“Of course I'm sure,” she says, sounding offended. “I saw the reports and scans myself. Besides, I'm a nurse, not an idiot.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“Sure. I've had worse. So, look, I'm not a liar, but I know you're going to want more than my just my word on this. I don't know what to do. I could, uh, fax you some copies? But, shit,” she says, repeats it a few times and takes in a shaky breath. “If somebody finds out I could get fired or arrested.” The words are spoken softly, as if she was afraid that if they were said loud enough, the sky would explode with hellfire just for her daring to even suggest it. Dan wants to tell her to just not get caught and that would solve her problem but he knows that would ruin what decent rapport he's built with her so far, despite the fact that the “rapport” itself mostly involved her speaking rapidly and Dan keeping his mouth shut and letting her talk. He pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Just... What's your name?”

“Rosa,” she says cautiously, offers no last name and Dan doesn't ask for one.

“Okay, Rosa. Just get me what you can, alright?”

“...Alright,” she says, after taking a moment to think it over. Dan reads her the number to their lowly fax machine that was stuffed in a dark corner next to a few printers and their toner-choked copier from a piece of paper Amy has taped to her desk that had it printed in straight, block numbers. He promises her that he won't reveal her name to a single soul and that seemed to relieve her, but only somewhat. After she hangs up and Dan makes sure to store her on his contacts list, he turns so he and Jonah were face-to-face and they both say nothing, simply staring at one another for a few seconds.

“Cancer,” Dan says, finally. “Terminal cancer. And on top of that game changing revelation, it turns out that Eric hated his brother. So you know, found out he was dying, comes home to be with the family. Or, fuck, I don't know,” Dan shrugs with his hands, “Maybe Teddy makes him come back.” With their father having passed away suddenly but unremarkably two years after Theodore got hold of the company and a mother that seems to have almost never existed—barring any scattered relatives amongst the country—the two brothers were the only real family they had left. Even with Eric's apparent hatred for Theodore, it wasn't unlikely that there was a last second mending of fences. Death usually has a way of doing that kind of thing to people.

None of this explains where Eric disappeared to, unless he died shortly after the fraud investigation came to a halt and Theodore decided to bury him without much fanfare or public mourning, the same way he had done with his father and the family appeared to have done as well with their matriarch, if she hadn't walked out on them at some point instead.

“We have to find where this son-of-a-bitch is buried,” Jonah says, as if he had been reading Dan's mind.

“Let's hope none of them were fucking cremated. Probably buried with his father,” Dan says. “Rich people like to do shit like that, don't they?” He saves the file he had been typing in and then emails it to himself before remembering that he didn't have a computer any longer and that all that was left was his phone. “Shit.” He'd ask for Jonah's email address, send it to him and use his laptop instead, but as far as he knew, it was still at his apartment and neither of them wanted to go back there at least until tomorrow. He'll just have to deal with it later. He trusted Amy enough not to snoop but, if he really felt it was necessary, he could always put a password on this account she was letting him use. It would annoy her to no end and Dan never missed an opportunity to ruffle her feathers, even slightly. “So, you know, use your freaky finding powers to dig up where the cemetery he might be in is. I need to get more coffee,” Dan says, shoving the keyboard into Jonah's lap and hoisting himself from his chair. As he walks away, he hears Jonah ask for some, too, but when he comes back, he only has one mug and pretends he hadn't heard him.

\- -

It's a forty-five minute drive to the cemetery where the father is buried and there was no indication that any of the other Nagels were there with him but there wasn't much else for either of them to do other than sit on their hands and wait for whenever that nurse found the nerves to fax copies of Eric's paperwork and that package of Nuvarin documents that was most likely still on it's way from Ronald Sharman's wife. Dan had asked Sue to keep an eye out on the fax machine, knew she didn't care enough about what it was she was grabbing for him to read it, and then the two of them were back in the parking lot and then in the car and then, once again, on the road.

Dan feels over-exposed, his skin crawling, now that they were out of the building and he relinquishes his keys to Jonah, allows him to drive under the guise of doing more research and having to possibly make a few calls, although he spends more time staring in the side mirror than at his phone. He catches Jonah doing something similar every time they stop at a red light or they're stuck behind a slow-moving car and he has a few moments to take his eyes off the road in front of them. There doesn't appear to be anybody following them this time but maybe that was the point, maybe they've already learned from their earlier mistake. He has visions of being shot at from somebody passing by and a fist clenches in his chest so he tries to keep his head down, thumbs hovering over the screen on his phone as he sorts through in his head what they have so far and what else they could possibly look for to build up the walls of a shaky foundation.

He's never dealt with this type of story before and he doubts there were many other people out there who have. Politics and government-types slipping and sliding in fields of goose shit as he stands on the sidelines and writes down every twist and turn is what he was supposed to be doing, writing sprawling essays on the current political climate as he simultaneously exposes wrongdoings that were worthy of their intellectual audience. That's what he does. This is medicine possibly gone awry and a monster caught on a shaky cell phone camera. The dream of a conspiracy theorist, perhaps and, for a second, Dan wonders if it would be worth contacting a writer from _TTK Magazine_ (a publication called 'Those That Know'—shortened to 'TTK'—that had popped into existence over fifteen years ago, filled with ridiculous rambling from men and women who spent too much time over-thinking even the smallest gesture and, quite possibly, collectively forgetting to take their meds) and see if somebody there had been sticking their nose in this long before he and Jonah had and if they wanted to take it off their hands. It was highly likely; he could probably get them to pay for the video right after he was sure he could get another copy of it onto Jonah's computer. Maybe somebody there would enjoy getting shot at for awhile.

Tempting as it was, though, Dan also knew he would hate himself for the rest of his life for giving this up. The only reason a journalist would pawn off their story to somebody else is if they were dead and, while that seemed to be a frighteningly possible outcome, that was the only way Dan could truly imagine having it be yanked from his fingers. He tries to push those dark clouds into the very back of his head, focus on something else because the longer he thinks about the fact that he's suddenly found himself in very real danger and, instead of camping out for a few days in the _Leviathan_ offices, he's sitting in the passenger seat of his own car while Jonah drives the two of them to the very open spaces of a cemetery, the more anxious he gets.

Dan finds himself checking through the mountains of emails he had accumulated since he last went through them yesterday and it's an easy enough thing that he doesn't have to put a large amount of energy into it and, while he scrolls through, his mind drifts back to a previous thought until he finds it entirely difficult to ignore and he lifts his head, reaching out to drum his fingers on the dashboard. Looking back down at his phone, he brings up a new window, typing in the _TTK Magazine_ name into the search bar and tapping on the first result.

“Jonah, you heard of some magazine called _Those That Know_?” Dan asks as he looks through the pages, laughing derisively at the article titles he went past (“Triangular Aircraft with Adaptive Camouflage Sighted Over Michigan!”, “Was the NWO / Illuminati Plan Exposed in 1969 in a Lecture?”, “The Mysteries of the Left Handed Path and the Symbolic Domination of Government”, “Satanic Super Soldiers: The Sinister Reality of Trauma-Based Mind Control”).

“No,” Jonah responds too quickly, almost defensively and Dan looks at him sideways. “I mean, yeah, of course I've heard of them. Bunch of nutjobs. Think the government is run by fucking lizard people.”

“And the Illuminati has put mind-controlling chemicals in our drinking water. Those would be the ones.”

“Why the hell do you want to know about them?”

“Because if there's anything conspiracy nuts like, it's buried secrets, especially when it comes to pharmaceutical companies. Even more so when they're led to believe there are extraterrestrials involved.”

“You don't believe it's aliens,” Jonah reminds him.

“I never said— I just don't think— Forget it. You do. They certainly will. Everything is aliens to them, right? Aliens or the government or some ludicrous combination of the two. Either way, they've got to know something. I'm desperate, Jonah. You should be, too. We're being followed and fucking shot at and what do we have? Crumbs and a video. Come on,” he says suddenly to his phone, “You've got to have a contact number on here somewhere. Why wouldn't you freak shows want to be contacted?”

He's still searching, caught up in reading an article by someone named Simon Holst that he had passed over earlier, the name Nuvarin in the headline catching his eye and it's a few years old but it might be useful and he's nearly made it to the end when Jonah stops the car and he looks up to see they're in the lot of the cemetery, a bleak stretch of trimmed green grass surrounded by a tall, cast iron fence made of looping and swirled metal. It isn't one of those places where the headstones are crammed so tightly together that Dan can't imagine that the bodies haven't wound up tangled together, stuffed on top of one another in broken coffins. This is the sort of place where wealthy people pay for a grave and then a few feet of land surrounding it, for headstones built towering with embellishments, angel statues staring down with arms spread wide.

“It didn't say anything about where exactly he was buried did it?” Dan asks and Jonah shakes his head, neither of them exiting the car. Dan had hoped that Jonah would have an exact location, that they could sprint there and back and be on their way in a matter of minutes. The glass in the car windows wasn't bulletproof but he somehow felt safer cooped up in here than he did standing outside, despite the fact that they had been fired upon when they were indoors. He looks around, turning in his seat, but there only appears to be two other cars, one with the second 'baby on board' sticker he'd seen that day in the back window, the other a 1998 Oldsmobile. Dan finds it highly unlikely that whomever is following them would go to such great and ridiculous lengths to disguise themselves. Then again, what does he know about this sort of thing really?

There's a sign screwed into the doors of the fence, letting them know that they closed at four and Dan glances at the time, finds they only have ten minutes or so until they'd have to try again tomorrow and hurries his pace. They follow the path made of sand and tiny stones for awhile, squinting at the names on the headstones closest to them, to the ones just a few feet behind, but they don't find what they're looking for so it's a few steps onto the grass, shoes leaving behind impressions as they walk. In the distance there's a man and woman holding a small child as they speak quietly to one another, standing in front of a grave, the figure of an elderly man at the other end of the lawn, hunched over and meandering back towards the parking lot. Nobody is paying Dan or Jonah any attention, yet he feels as if they stick out like sore thumbs.

“Maybe we should have brought flowers,” Dan says, half-jokingly, watches as Jonah bends over while not stopping to grasp at a bouquet that somebody had left earlier, sitting against a polished headstone, which he then hands to Dan. “Great. Thanks,” Dan says, looks around, but it doesn't seem like anybody else has noticed. “You couldn't have picked up some nicer ones?” The ones he's clutching look a few days old, the steams already starting to droop, the petals on the red and purple flowers wrinkled and fragile.

“Those look better,” Jonah says, pointing at a bouquet of white extravagant flowers with thick stems, placed in a crystal vase, set down in front of a gravestone with a weeping angel, stone hands over her delicate features. Dan can't tell if he's kidding or not but he reaches over to grab briefly at Jonah's jacket anyway, shaking his head.

They're there for what feels like hours and, at one point, they pass by the family, who turns to watch them and give a sort of sympathetic nod as if to say they understand. Dan gives them a small sort of acknowledging wave back and a few feet ahead of him, he hears Jonah exclaim excitedly that he had “found it”. The woman furrows her brow, looks to Jonah and then back at Dan but she gets distracted by her baby's squealing gibberish and Dan walks away, taking long strides until he was standing next to Jonah, who was pointing at the headstone right in front of him. **MARTIN NAGEL** , it says in clear block letters. **LOVING HUSBAND AND FATHER. 1958 – 2008**. They stare at it for a moment as if expecting something to happen and Dan tosses the flowers he had been clutching sloppily down on the grass. A glance to the left and then the right confirms, strangely, that the father looks to be the only Nagel buried there after all.

“Unless you're willing to grab a shovel and dig him up,” Dan says, “I think we can at least confirm that their father is definitely dead. Eric, on the other hand... well. He's not here. This was a waste of time,” Dan mutters to himself, rubbing his face with his hands.

“Uh... Dan,” Jonah says his name slowly as if there was something entirely obvious he wanted to make sure he knew, and Dan pulls his hands away, turns to snap at him because he doesn't need to hear whatever it was Jonah could possibly have to say to him and the last thing he sees before being cold-cocked on the side of the head with something hard and heavy is a large man in a suit holding what looks very much to be like a gun to Jonah's back.

\- -

Dan's aware of being moved around, being hauled to his feet and made to walk away but it's all flashes and blurred images, voices trying to ask him questions and him barely mumbling in response. He remembers feeling a sharp prick in his neck and everything goes black. He wakes up in what he quickly realizes is the trunk of an apparently moving car, and he very rapidly notices quite a few things: he has no clear idea how long it had been since he'd been knocked out, his phone and his bag are missing, he's alone, and his head is throbbing. The most distressing of all of these swift realizations is the complete lack of Jonah, the next of which is the disappearance of everything he had with him. The world around him sways for a few seconds as he shifts, as if the trunk had flooded with water and he was floating in the middle of it all, but it calms down enough after he closes his eyes and takes a couple gradual deep breaths.

“Shit,” he says. “Shit, shit, shit.” How could everything have gone upside-down so quickly? This was so nonsensical that Dan momentarily ponders once again if he's been dreaming this entire situation and that, any minute now, he was going to wake up with a nasty hangover in his own bed but the pain he's feeling is too real to be imagined. They hit a bump in the road and his stomach lurches but he swallows it down, grimacing, and he pushes his palms flat against the roof of the trunk door as if he thought he had the strength to push it open by force. His heart is racing, skin tingling, his whole body vibrating and he figures he had a moment to allow himself one small panic attack before collecting himself again.

Five minutes later, he's controlled it, pushed it back into the tight little box he stored his mental distress and opens his eyes, uncurling his hands from the tight fists they had been in at his sides. This definitely wasn't his car; it felt too old and he could smell the sour stench of blue smoke leaking from what he assumed to be the tailpipe. When he was very little, a police officer came by his school to give the kids a lecture after a kindergartener had been stolen right from the sidewalk one afternoon. He told them what to do if taken by someone, how to escape before you were grabbed or all the ways to possibly break free if you were stupid or unlucky enough to not get away. At the time, he had sat in the front row, listening only half-heartedly and finding the whole situation utterly confusing. Later on in life, when he was reminded of that situation, he shifted from confusion to amusement. Now, as he lay here, his head smacking against the floor as they ride over another pothole, he was beginning to wish that he had retained even the most nominal bit of helpful information.

Making an excessive amount of noise wouldn't be productive but it was his best and currently only bet so he begins to shout and yell and kick his legs around. He thinks he hears a deep voice somewhere near the front of the vehicle tell him to shut up and then a familiar voice say his name. Jonah? Maybe. Hopefully. He keeps going, even when he's starting to feel it in his throat because perhaps it would be enough to annoy them into pulling over. Dan highly doubted he could take on whatever men would be staring down at him, but he'd be willing to try and that has to count for something.

Remarkably, he can actually feel the car begin to slow and, at first, he thinks that they're just at a red light but he hears the tires crunch and they come to a complete stop, the engine left on but a door is being opened and slammed shut. Obviously they didn't expect whatever they planned on doing to shut him up to last very long and they must be one of the only vehicles on the road if they aren't concerned with being seen. He breathes in and out, tightens his muscles. He could play dead but with the commotion he had been making only minutes before, he knew they wouldn't believe him. The trunk pops open just a few inches, fingers curl between the space it made and Dan has a moment of clarity, grabs on to whatever he can securely grasp and slams down the edge of the trunk door onto the fingers with as much effort as he can manage. The person on the other side howls, hands disappearing and Dan scrambles out from inside feet first, the bottom of his shoe hitting something solid. He blinks heavily in the sudden light change and then he freezes. Now what was he supposed to do?

There's a man in front of him nursing what are most likely broken fingers and a ruined nose and Dan stupidly turns his back on him, goes towards the front of the car where another man sat in the passenger seat, Jonah sitting behind in the center of the seat in the back. Dan does the only thing that his addled brain figures makes sense: he opens the driver's side door and sits behind the wheel.

“What the fuck are you doing?” The man next to him says, face going red with shock and anger, glances behind them to see his companion bloody and upset, looks back to Dan who grips the steering wheel with both hands.

“Uh...” Dan says dumbly, jumping when a foot comes from seemingly nowhere to collide with the side of the man's head and it's awkward and not a heavy enough movement to do any real damage but it's enough to distract him and the man tries to speak, his hands going to something on his belt so Jonah does it again but, by now, the other man had recovered enough that he was making his way back towards where Dan was sitting and this was wrong, this was a fucking idiotic idea, he should have just waited until they reached wherever they were being taken, at least then they might have been able to find some damn answers before they were unceremoniously killed. Now he and Jonah were going to be murdered right then and there and dumped on the side of the road, left to be found by another driver or, worst case scenario, the local wildlife.

Dan turns the key and begins to drive.

The look on the faces of both the man left on the road and the one in the passenger seat are priceless but the moment of stunned surprise doesn't buy either Dan nor Jonah much time and they're still trapped in a now-moving vehicle with one of the people who had kidnapped them.

“How do you think this is going to play out?” The man asks. It's a good question. Neither of them had nearly enough strength to pull an action film hero move and try to push him from the car especially since... _Hold on. He's not wearing his seat belt._ Jonah delivers another kick to the man's head in a display of ridiculously good timing and Dan uses the distraction to put his own seat belt on as casually as he could manage with shaking hands. He can see a thick-trunked tree just a few feet ahead and he swallows, taps his foot just a bit harder on the gas. He only had one chance at this and no way to tell Jonah without revealing the plan to the one person in there he didn't want to have know what's going to happen. _Goddammit, Jonah, you better be paying attention_ , Dan thinks and then drives the car directly into the tree.

The airbag explodes in his face and it does the same for the guy next to him but it doesn't do him much good and Dan hears more than sees as his body goes crashing through the windshield. There's a thud from behind him and, son of a bitch, Jonah better not be dead, too, he didn't think he could possibly handle dealing with that today and he swivels his neck with a dizzy head to see Jonah pulling himself up from where he had been laying on the dirty car floor.

“Holy shit, dude,” Jonah says, struggling to get back in his seat with hands that seemed to be cuffed behind him. “I can't believe you fucking did that.”

“I kind of can't believe I fucking did that either,” Dan says and actually lets out a laugh that he blames on adrenaline and his brain not being entirely sure what else it was supposed to do.

“Is he dead?” Jonah asks, craning his neck and Dan looks as well but neither of them can see him anywhere.

“I hope not,” Dan says. “But I haven't been feeling particularly lucky today so, you know, probably.” He honestly is beginning to feel as if every last bit of anxiety and panic that he had stored away for all those years had been used up in one swift go, like when you save a bottle of wine for a special occasion and then accidentally wind up drinking the whole bottle when you're already drunk and it's the only alcohol you can find left in the entire apartment. He knows that that isn't exactly true, that trauma isn't the cure for what ailed him, but it's a nice thought and the only explanation he can come up with at that moment as to why he was so unbelievably calm. “Oh, God,” Dan says, fumbling with his seatbelt and finally managing to steady his hands enough to unbuckle it, “I feel like shit.”

“I know, right,” Jonah says, “My shoulders are killing me.” If he had seen Dan send a deathly glare his way, he certainly didn't acknowledge it. “You think you could get these fucking things off me, Dan? I'm into some weird shit but I'm not particularly enjoying this right now.”

“Hold on,” Dan says. “Let's hope the key wasn't on the guy I left behind. Or, you know...” He indicates out through the windshield. “Because I'm not going out there to check.” He leans over to the other side of the car, elbow resting on the empty seat and pops open the glove compartment but the only things he finds inside after searching blindly with his hand is a stack of manuals and a cheap phone that he takes out and flips open as he sits back, leaning sideways in his seat. It's on and he looks through it, but there's nothing. No contacts, no memos, not text messages. Not even Tetris. He's about to toss it back to Jonah to let him have a look at it but remembers he has no way of catching it so he shrugs and starts to put it in his pocket when the phone begins to ring. It startles him enough that he fumbles and drops it on the floor and he bends over to pick it back up, the sudden movement sending a whirling rush to his head that he has to take a moment to recover from before he does anything else.

“Answer it,” Jonah urges him and Dan pulls a face, mouth down-turned and brow furrowed and he's going to tell him that he definitely doesn't plan on answering it but then he figures, fuck it, he might as well. If he doesn't like who's on the other end of the line or what the person has to say, he can always hang up and, besides, it's probably not the only phone they have, especially since he's relatively sure that the black lump stuffed behind the passenger seat is his bag. He and Jonah watch as a car drives past them but doesn't stop, as if they were behind some sort of invisible forcefield or the driver took one look at them and decided they were in too much of a hurry to deal with whatever that was today.

“Who is this?” He demands. There's a lengthy pause and Dan thinks that maybe whoever it is had hung up on him but then he hears a voice say:

“Well, Mister Egan. This isn't who I expected to hear.” It's masculine and deep and somehow familiar but Dan can't figure out if it just reminds him of someone else from his past or if it really was somebody he knew and his head hurts too much for him to spend too much time thinking about it. “I assume this means you managed to get yourself out of the... situation we put you and your friend in?”

“Something like that,” Dan says, glancing once again out towards the front of the vehicle and he feels his throat tighten and he starts to sweat. Not the time, not the time.

“My associates?”

“Can't come to the phone right now,” Dan says, his voice trembling slightly with fear and a hint of anger despite how badly he wishes it weren't. “Can I take a message?”

“That won't be necessary. They already know I'm disappointed.”

“Can I ask you something you fucking prick?” Dan says abruptly and there's another terse moment of dead air.

“Go ahead.”

“You really think you'll get what you want by killing us?” It's not exactly what he had wanted to inquire of him or, at least, not the way he wanted to ask it but there it was, out in the open and he waits, jaw clenched.

“Who said we were trying to do that?” He replies with a faint laugh and Dan wonders if there was any real possibility of him being able to reach through the phone to strangle whomever he was talking to at the moment. “No, I've had enough of dead bodies, Mister Egan. But, I will say, I have obviously underestimated at least you, if not your friend, Mister Ryan as well. We'll just have to try again tomorrow, then. I think you've had a rough day. There's a diner about a twenty minute walk from where you are,” the voice says. “Why don't you go there. I can call Miss Brookheimer and have her come get you. And I suggest you do as I say. I assume that anyone who has just driven past you has called the police. They should be there in less than half an hour. They respond quickly to car accidents.” Without another word, the call disconnects and Dan is left in stunned silence. He pulls the phone away from his ear and stares at it, utterly bewildered and then looks around the inside of the car, peeking behind the rearview mirror and searching the dashboard but he doesn't see anything that looks even remotely like a camera.

“What is it? What'd they say?”

“We have to go,” Dan says, thinks about leaving the phone he had found there but decides to take it with him instead and he stumbles out of the car, tripping over himself as he goes around to the back door on the side where he saw his bag, throwing it open and reaching for it. Jonah is staring at him, mouth agape, and Dan gives a single shake of his head. “We have to go. Now,” he repeats, watches as Jonah uses his feet to kick himself out of the car and Dan helps him stand.

“Go where?” Jonah asks but Dan just holds his arm and yanks on him.

“Walk and talk. I'm sure you're capable of it,” Dan says as they start to move, marching down the side of the eerily empty road, going away from the car and, as they pass the tree Dan hit, he can see the outline of a figure stretched out awkwardly in the tall grass and he feels his stomach twist. He tells Jonah what the man had said and sees Jonah go pale, but that could just be the fading light.

\- -

Amazingly, the man hadn't lied to them and, almost exactly twenty minutes of walking later, they find the diner that was supposed to be there, the dirt lot in front with only a couple cars but, when they enter through the glass front door, the hinge squeaking, it turns out that they're the only customers and that the vehicles must belong to the lone, young waiter and whomever else was in the kitchen. The kid runs through a gamut of emotions in a short amount of time, shifting from interest to surprise to worry and he pulls at the collar of his polo shirt. Dan picks a booth closest to the door and flops down, the fake leather cushion cracked and letting out a rush of air from his weight and Jonah collapses down across from him, hands still tucked behind his back.

The waiter brings them menus but Dan waves him off, orders two coffees, and the young man looks more concerned about Jonah being handcuffed than he does about the current state of Dan's face or the fact that the two of them seemingly just appeared from nowhere to stumble in through their front door.

“I appreciate you ordering for me, I really do,” Jonah says, apparently never quite learning the concept of having an 'indoor voice', “But how do you expect me to drink it exactly?” Dan gestures for the waiter again, waits for him to approach the table before speaking.

“Could you, uh, put his in a glass with a straw? Maybe throw some ice in there. Actually,” Dan says, “Do that with mine, too.”

“I hate iced coffee,” Jonah says once the waiter walks away.

“Well too fucking bad,” Dan says.

“Maybe I didn't even want coffee, did you think about that?”

“No, Jonah,” Dan grumbles, “I didn't think about whether or not you were in the mood for coffee. I'm sorry I'm a little preoccupied with the fact that we were fucking kidnapped and that I may have killed someone and oh, right, I just had a pleasant conversation with the asshole that is responsible for the utter disaster today has been so far!” A fist is slammed down on the table and, just to his left, he hears someone clear their throat and both he and Jonah turn to see their waiter, now with two large plastic cups, dark liquid swirling with large cubes of ice, paper covered straws balanced neatly on the rims. He lowers them down in front of them slowly, cautiously, and backs away, apologizing for interrupting. Hopefully, all he heard was the inflection of an angry rant and none of the actual meat of it or they'd be in even more trouble than they already were, although Dan somehow doubts that was honestly possible.

It's almost six-thirty in the evening, the sun practically setting to give way to dark skies clogged with pitch black rain clouds, and they're down to the their third coffees each (Jonah will have to go to the bathroom at some point and Dan was filled with dread as he waited for that moment to arrive). A few other people have come and gone: travelers just passing through and a police officer that arrived by motorcycle and just stayed long enough to inhale a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of iced tea before rushing back out the way he had come through, as if he had never even been there at all.

The door suddenly bursts open with the force of a cyclone having attacked it and both he and Jonah look up to see Amy standing there, hands on her hips and she gradually turns, eyes narrowing, finger pointing threateningly at the pair of them, before she finally marches over to where they were sitting and stands at the end of the table, palms hitting it hard enough to rattle their unused cutlery.

“What the actual fuck,” she shouts and the waiter behind the counter drops the dish he had been putting away, a couple seated at a table across the room hushing their conversation to stare.

“Amy, could you please just—”

“'Amy could you please just' what? Calm down? No, Dan, I don't think I will, if that's all the same to you. Do you want to know what just happened? Hm?” She doesn't wait for either of them to answer. “I'm sitting in a restaurant and I'm following up on an interview I had done with— Nevermind who with. The discussion is going well. I'm getting boatloads of information. Boatloads. And then my phone starts to ring. Which is strange because I was pretty sure I had put it on vibrate. But oh, well, I could have forgotten. I ignore it. Oh, sorry, person I'm interviewing, keep talking, don't mind me. But it keeps ringing. And ringing. And ringing. So finally I answer and who do I hear on the other end? Some... guy with a strangely familiar voice and he tells me that you and Jonah are in trouble, that you need my help and, by the way, they're at the Pipeline Diner which turns out to be an hour away.” She finishes but mostly so she can catch her breath, her chest heaving, eyes shining, shoulders tense, and she finally looks at them, back and forth from Dan's bruised head and Jonah's bound hands. “What the hell happened?” Amy asks, voice still steaming with fury but now with a hint of unease creeping up from behind.

“We were kidnapped, that's what fucking happened,” Jonah says and Amy blinks at him, turns to Dan who leans forward to take a long sip from his watery, lukewarm coffee.

“I'm sorry,” Amy says, “One more time?”

“Kidnapped,” Jonah repeats, drawing out the word, one syllable at a time. “We were kidnapped. They put Dan in the trunk of a car. They said I wouldn't fit so they handcuffed me and—”

“Right. Handcuffs. You're fine? Good. Hold on one minute,” Amy interrupts him, puts her finger up in his face and sits down beside him, focusing on Dan and folding her hands on the table in front of her. “The trunk of a car?”

“Yup,” Dan says.

“'Yup'. Just... 'Yup'. In the trunk of a car. No big deal.”

“Of course it's a big fucking deal!” Dan says, voice rising and he coughs, absent-mindedly scratching at his arm, glances over Amy and Jonah's shoulders at the couple who had gone back to eating but were no longer speaking to one another. “I don't know what else you want me to say.” He rubs fingers at either side of his eyes, a dull throbbing pain clenching like a vise around his forehead. “So some guy calls you out of the blue and tells you we're in trouble and you just... go, without any questions?”

“First of all, I had a lot of questions but the asshole wasn't entirely forthcoming with answers, alright? Second...” She starts but hesitates, taps a finger on the table. “Forget it. You're welcome, by the way. But this isn't about me. This is about you. Both of you,” she says, making sure to look pointedly at Jonah so he knew he wasn't being left out of this catastrophe, that this wasn't just between her and Dan. “So here's what's going to happen: You're going to tell me what's going on. Not just what happened in the past few hours, but all of it. The whole disgusting ball of wax. Even the things you've already told me. Enough of this 'we don't want you too involved' bullshit, got it? Enough.” She waits, but neither Dan nor Jonah speak. “Somebody better start talking because we're not leaving until you do.”

“Fine,” Dan says and starts to explain everything, begins from when Mike contacted him two days ago, stretches it to when he and Jonah found themselves on a guided tour of Nuvarin, and finally brings her to today, to the gunshots and then to this evening when Jonah and Dan had been standing at the gravestone of the Nagel brother's father and then woke up in the trunk of a car. Jonah interjects with his own side of things, with embellishments and misplaced attempts at appearing braver than he had been at the time but Dan doesn't argue, allows him the chance to have a go at metaphorically pounding fists on his chest to impress her because he knows that Amy won't believe it anyway. When he finishes his lengthy narrative, he takes another hearty drink from his cup, his mouth parched and his head pounding more than it had been before they had been sitting here. Amy takes Jonah's glass from where it was resting in front of him, a ring of condensation forming around the bottom and flips the straw to the other end, drinking from it as she takes a minute to comprehend what she had just heard.

“Let me get this straight,” she says at last. “You've been followed, shot at, and kidnapped and that all happened today.” Dan nods and she opens her mouth as if preparing to say something but then sighs heavily instead. “And it's all because of that weird video you made me watch this afternoon? The one you had me lock in my desk.” Dan nods again and she looks to Jonah, who does the same. “So what's our next move?” Jonah and Dan both sit up simultaneously and Dan lifts his hands, palms facing Amy.

“Whoa, hey, hold on,” he says but Amy just snorts.

“Did you think I wanted to know what was going on just for shits and giggles? Oh, no, no. I'm in this now. Forget the Selina Meyer story I was working on. This is way more interesting. Bat-shit insane, but interesting. Besides, we all know you would have called me for more help later. I'm just speeding up the inevitable.” She adjusts her bag on her shoulder and finishes Jonah's drink, standing up and wiping water from his palms onto a paper napkin. “Come on. Pay for your crappy coffee and let's get the hell out of here. We've got shit to do.”

\- -

“First stop,” Amy says from behind the wheel as they cruise down the quiet road, orange glowing street lamps lighting their way as they pass by flat land and dying trees, the city spread out along the horizon in front of them, “is a hospital.”

“Amy...” Dan starts to say but she shoots him a look and he frowns. “Fine. Hospital. I don't know what you expect me to tell them when they ask what happened. I don't think 'intentionally causing a car accident that probably killed someone I thought was trying to kill me' is going to go over very well.”

“You'll figure it out,” Amy says, glances in the rearview mirror and then sneaks another look at Dan, who was busy keeping his gaze fixed out his own window, elbow resting on the small ledge, face leaning against his arm. Jonah is in the back, softly snoring, having fallen asleep almost as soon as Amy had backed out of the parking space, stretched across the seats, head pressed against his window, breath fogging it with every exhale. Dan almost wants to wake him up, simply because he himself cannot sleep and if he couldn't, why was it fair that Jonah could? “Do you really think you killed him?”

“Dunno. Maybe,” Dan says and leaves it at that.

“I don't know how you can be so untroubled by that but okay.”

Dan doesn't know either but is hit with a sudden flashback to when he was eleven and Dan had been hanging out on his front yard when a group of boys about six years older than him were walking by, but stopped when they saw him, whispering and laughing amongst themselves before walking up on the lawn to sit in a semi-circle around where Dan had been poking at a caterpillar with a blade of grass. He knew he should have been wary right from the start because older boys never talked to kids like him unless they had something terrible in mind but he had been momentarily struck with awe that they were paying attention to him that he allowed himself to bask in the moment, arms folding over his bent knees as he soaked in what he assumed to be one of his most defining points in his childhood thus far. They asked eventually if he wanted to play a game and had said yes, of course he did, like it was the stupidest question he had ever been asked.

As it turned out, their idea of a 'game' was to lead him away from home and to an alley behind the local hardware store where they had found a stray dog, where they then took a step back and dared Dan to kill it, blocking his exit and harassing him until he did something. He had been horrified at first but, believing it to be some sort of sadistic ritual to be able to join the Big Boys Club and, not wanting to appear as the definition of a weenie, sent home ridiculed and kicked around, he did the only thing he figured was right.

He hadn't slept well that night and the older boys never spoke to him again, as if their suggestion had been one big joke and they never expected anything but Dan to run home with tears in his eyes and his tail between his legs. It hadn't bothered him quite as much as he thought it might in the days preceding it but he had told himself that it could never happen again. Killing something, Dan had realized, wasn't particularly easy for him to do but, after the shock of going through with it, he found the aftermath manageable. He'd almost forgotten about that damn dog until just then. He'd chalked up his levelheadedness at the time to adrenaline and shock but maybe he's just got some wires crossed in his head. Dan doesn't tell any of this Amy and just sighs instead, squinting up at a broken light as they pass it by, the bulb inside blinking white and yellow.

“So the thing with Lombardi and his supposed illegitimate kid that Mike told you about,” Amy says, changing the subject, “That doesn't have anything to do with this? You think Mike knew?” Dan laughs, smiles just with one side of his mouth.

“Are you kidding? Mike didn't know. If he knew, he would have told me a long time ago. There's a reason I use him as my source. Guy's terrible at keeping secrets. Nah, I guarantee that Caitlin was one of those whistle-blower-types who had wanted to talk for months but kept finding excuses not to but suddenly found two journalists in her lap and decided that it was sign or some crap like that. If you or, god forbid, Gary, had been there, she'd probably have told either of you instead.”

“I hate those types,” Amy grimaces and Dan has to agree. Whistle-blowers are what keep people like him and Amy busy but it's the ones that burst all over the first journalist they see—even if that person happens to be a highly inexperienced blogger—that were the banes of their existence. All they want is their story heard, want it out like a tumor, and it winds up being horribly mishandled by an amateur who thinks they've hit the gold pot and the end of a particularly long rainbow and deals with the situation by using everything the've learned from watching movies. It's what happened with Slate Technologies: a technician finds out that things are going topsy-turvy at the company he works for and, when he can't keep it inside anymore, the first person he tells is the nervous kid who ran an electronics blog and suddenly thought he was the protagonist in a variation on a legal thriller. Everything that could go wrong did and, in the end, the technician never found closure, Slate Technologies changed their name and moved out to California and, last Dan had heard, the tech blogger had deleted his entire presence off the internet and disappeared into thin air. All things considered, Dan figures, it was probably a good thing that this thing with Nuvarin wound up in his (and, he grudgingly admits, Jonah's) hands and not somebody else.

There's another lull, nothing but the sound of the rushing of the wind outside as they drive and Amy flicks on her turn signal, maneuvering around a particularly slow minivan that they had caught up to at some point. Dan reaches by his feet to where he had dropped his bag and finally began to sort through it, relieved and slightly taken aback to see that the contents had been mostly left alone. Some folder and pages hadn't been left in the order he knew he had originally put them and both of his phones now sat in the very bottom, one on top of the other, eerily silent. He pulls them out, his second phone already dead, battery drained, but his main one still had at least an hour left in it and he scrolls through, checking each and every little corner of it but, just as it was with his bag, it didn't appear to have been tampered with too much. He digs around in it again, feels something else heavy tucked in the corner and brings up what turns out to be Jonah's phone, figures they must have just dumped it in there for lack of anywhere else to put it. The phone he took from the car is out of his pocket and he sits there, two phones in each hand. Amy notices and smiles a little, shaking her head. Three of them go back in his bag but he keeps one of them out, clutches it tightly, knows he should turn it off to save the battery but he can't be bothered.

“Hey,” Amy says after a minute, “While you've got that out... look up how to get those handcuffs off Jonah.”

“Right,” Dan replies, starting to type in a search, thumbs quickly tapping the keyboard. “Probably could have done that awhile ago, huh?”

“Blame it on the concussion,” Amy says, shrugging one shoulder. “Besides, it's kinda funny.”

\- -

Amy parks in the visitor's lot of the hospital about a block away from the large and brightly lit building and then quarrels with the woman at the booth that explains she'll be charged if they stay longer than an hour but she takes the ticket anyway, slapping it down unenthusiastically on the dashboard, pressing her chin against the top of the steering wheel as she leans against it to find a spot that wasn't somewhere inside the parking structure, finding one in the corner, right under a drooping section of a chainlink fence.

“Should have gone to Saint Mary's instead,” Amy grumbles as if none of this had been her idea in the first place, turning off the engine and shifting the gear into park. “Jonah!” She yells his name and hits him hard on the leg with the side of her fist and he jolts upright, smacking the top of his head on the roof of the car.

“What the fuck,” Jonah says, moves on instinct to touch at the spot on his head that hurt but all that shifts are his shoulders, lifting like he already was answering his own question. “I think my arms have gone numb. I can't feel my fucking fingers.”

“Relax,” Amy says, scrounging around in her purse to pull out a bobby pin covered in dust and lint and then looks to Dan. “Do you want to do it or shall I?”

“I'll do it,” Dan says, handing Amy his phone. “Just tell me what to do.” Jonah turns around, facing the back without being asked and Dan opens his car door just enough for the internal lights to kick on so he can see what he's doing. It takes longer than it probably should have and, by the end, everyone is warm and frustrated, the phone is practically dead, Dan's fingers are sore, and he's only managed to get one cuff undone on Jonah's right wrist, leaving the rest of it dangling from his left like a particularly unwieldy bracelet. “That's it,” Dan says, throwing the bent and now useless bobby pin out into the parking lot. “I'm done.”

“You're not done!” Jonah shoots back but Dan just puts his face in his hands, tells him that it's good enough for now and that he can just deal with it for a little while. Jonah mutters something insulting but faces the two of them again anyway, carefully stretching his arms forward, groaning tortuously with each careful movement. He lets them drape weakly in his lap as if they were dead weight and bends forward, hitting his forehead against the back of Dan's seat and Dan leans his own head against the other side of the headrest. For a few minutes, nobody speaks nor shows any indication of wanting to leave.

“Okay,” Amy says, “Enough brooding. Let's get this over with. If we're lucky we'll get out of there by, oh, I don't know,” She glances at the time on her phone, sees that it's already close to eleven o'clock, “Some time before midnight.”

“This was your idea,” Dan reminds her.

“I know. It doesn't mean I have to like it.” They leave the car, Amy leading the way as Dan and Jonah trudge behind her like the walking dead.

\- -

It takes half an hour before anybody can see Dan, even though Amy makes it clear as loudly as possible that he has a head injury. Both she and Jonah insist on coming with him when a nurse finally calls his name and they stand on either side of the bed he was led to as he sits on the end of it, hands folded. Amy busies herself on her phone despite disparaging looks from nurses who pass them by and Jonah babbles incessantly, saying nothing in particular about much of anything and, by the time a doctor finally shows to talk to him, Dan has suggested leaving at least five different times, only for Amy to shut him down each time he brought it up.

He tells the doctor about falling down a flight of stairs, about how he had taken so long to come in to get checked because he needed convincing and Amy gives a single wave without even sparing them a glance. Somehow he manages to tell it suitably enough and, after being asked a list of questions ranging from having him verify what happened to his current mental state (a query that both Amy and Jonah laugh at at the exact same time and Dan frowns because Amy may be allowed to find that humorous but where does Jonah get the nerve to think they're close enough for him to make a joke about his brain), he's carted away from everyone to be given a series of scans.

When it's all said and done, he's told that they'd prefer to have him stay overnight but that he could leave if he wanted, as long as his friends were willing to watch him, and the three of them walk out of the hospital at exactly twelve-fifty-three in the morning. It's cooler outside than it had been before and a heavy dampness hangs in the air, the sidewalk shining from a rain that must have come and gone while they were inside. As they wander back towards where they parked, Amy crosses her arms and suggests parting ways, says that she can drop them off at whatever apartment they wanted to go to as long as it wasn't her own but Dan can feel Jonah tense by his side and he doesn't chide him. He'd be on edge, too, at the thought of having to go back to a place he had been shot at earlier that day and, besides, his window was presumably still completely destroyed. Most likely, at some point, he would have to explain the damage to his landlord and Dan doesn't envy that conversation.

He thinks about going home but he's not sure he'd be able to sleep and, with his laptop obliterated and still on Jonah's coffee table, there wasn't much to go back for, a thought that he knew he should find depressing but he was too currently preoccupied to care.

“Or,” Amy starts to say with a tone in her voice like driving them to their apartments hadn't really been what she wanted and had merely suggested it as a courtesy, “We could go back to the _Leviathan_. I came to get you guys right from that damn restaurant. I've still got my key.” Not that it really mattered. Kent expected and encouraged them to use the office whenever they liked, even if that was in the middle of the night, and left a spare key hidden, buried underneath the dirt in a fake potted plant near the elevators (“Who would look there?” was his reasoning when Dan had questioned the decision) in case their own key had been forgotten at home.

Dan surprises himself by looking to Jonah to see what he thought and he nods, says that his arms are killing him but, yeah, he could get some work done and then both he and Amy look to Dan, who puts his hands up, shaking his head. He isn't going to say no.

\- -

“I fucking knew it,” Amy exclaims as they sit around her desk, alone in the darkened office, the only light from the ambient yellow lights in the ceiling and the glow of her computer screen. “I knew there was something going on with Eric. Wouldn't have guessed he was dying but, damn it. I'd heard rumors about them not getting along, you know, which is why I kept trying to dig into why he just suddenly showed up.” She sits back, crossing one leg over the other and gently spinning her chair back and forth, fingers drumming on the top of the desk before flipping through the copies of Eric's records that the nurse had faxed a few hours ago, which Dan had found in a small stack on his desk with a post-it that said 'not your secretary, this is the first and last time'. “I can't believe you got some poor nurse to get these for you.”

“Hey,” Dan says, “She volunteered. I mean, I may have persuaded her just a bit but, come on, this is me we're talking about here.”

“You are so— Fill in the blank. Whatever it is, that's what you are. I can't be bothered to insult you right now,” Amy says, flicking her wrist dismissively at him. Jonah reaches over, the cuff still attached to his left wrist jingling as it hits against the desk and he looks through the papers, reading them as if he knows exactly what they say.

“This dude was fucked up,” Jonah says, turning to the last page. “I don't need to be a damn doctor to see that. The only way he lived through this is if he was Jesus him-fucking-self and he called in a favor with the big G.O.D. upstairs.”

“Thank you for that eloquent contribution, Jonah,” Dan says, snatching the stack of papers from him. “Did everyone get a good look? Because as much as it fucking pains me to have to do this, these babies are going straight to the industrial shredder in Kent's office.” Nobody openly objects so Dan stands, shuffling off to feed them one at a time through the thin slot, hearing snippets of a murmured conversation between Jonah and Amy in between the intolerable whirring of the machine chewing the paper into tiny diamond-shaped pieces.

“Dan,” Jonah says as soon as Dan comes back, sounding almost incensed, hands gripping the arms of his chair.

“Yes, Jonah,” Dan encourages, sitting down across from him.

“Amy fucking talked to Eric.”

“What?” Dan turns to face her and she makes a face, looks as if Dan just opened his mouth to show her the food he had still been chewing on. “When?”

“Just this evening,” she says sarcastically. “When the hell do think? It was when I was working on that story about the investigation involving Theodore. About a week before Eric disappeared and I was told it was all over, time to move on. I tried to go by Theodore's office to spring a few questions on him and Eric comes walking out instead. We talked for about five minutes but I'm pretty sure he didn't give two shits about me being a journalist. Spent the entire time looking at my chest. Certainly didn't look like he was crawling up to death's front door, though.”

“Are you sure?” Dan asks and Amy gives a shrugging gesture with her right hand.

“My Aunt Marge,” Jonah says, “Tit cancer. No idea until she just up and died one afternoon.”

“Wow,” Amy says because what else was there to say to that, really, Dan figures.

“I'm just saying. It happens.”

“We should have just left you handcuffed in Amy's car,” Dan says and Jonah moves his chair back as if he thought they might actually try to put him back there. “Look, Amy, is there anything else about these guys you neglected to tell us?”

“Hey! If I had known that my five minutes of small talk with Eric Nagel was that important to you, I might have said something earlier.”

“Really?”

“...Probably not,” she admits, turning back towards her computer, switching over to the account that she had set up for Dan or, at least, she would have if she hadn't found it password protected, something he had decided to do last minute despite initially dismissing the idea. “Seriously?”

“You weren't on board when I did that,” Dan says, scooting forward, moving her slightly out of the way to type in the short word he had chosen and the screen pops up, generic wallpaper and all, the only thing saved on the desktop the single document he had hurriedly typed notes in while talking to the nurse that afternoon, which Amy clicks on to open, taking a minute to read through it.

“A temper tantrum, huh?” She comments, sighing. “So, based on what you've told me so far and what scraps I still have left, plus that godforsaken video, we've got something but also not much of anything. Am I wrong?” Dan wants to argue but he knows that she's right. So far, everything they've uncovered was interesting on their own (the video, the sickness of Eric Nagel, the disappearance of Ronald Sharman, the involvement of Caitlin Kirchner who turned out to not be Caitlin Kirchner at all) but put together, Dan realizes, they barely have a coherent story or, at least, not anything that Kent would be willing to publish in it's current form. It's nothing but a skeleton and the only people who would publish an article that was thirty-percent fact and seventy-percent speculation were people on micro-blogging sites and conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists, Dan remembers, like the writers for _TTK Magazine_.

While he pulls out his phone from his bag, attempting to turn it on, forgetting that the battery was completely drained, he explains to the other two what he had planned on doing after their trip to the cemetery, that he knew it was a last resort sort of option and that the last thing he expected was cooperation from a bunch of paranoid weirdos, but it was currently the only plan he could come up with that didn't involve them completely giving up or finding themselves having to turn to finding a way back inside Nuvarin (something that, Dan doesn't add, he feels is an inevitability despite any of his best efforts to avoid it). He curses, tossing his phone down on the desk, reaching back into his bag and taking out what turns out to be Jonah's phone instead and throws it at him, chuckling when it hits him in the chest because he hadn't been paying attention. Next is his second phone, followed by the one he had taken from the glove compartment of the crashed car, which he studies and then gives to Amy for lack of anywhere better to put it.

“Let's see...” Dan says, pulling the keyboard closer, opening the browser and beginning a search, easily finding their website once again, clicking through to try and find a phone number that he had struggled to locate before, still coming up with nothing, their 'Contact Us' page not loading, as if somebody intentionally figured out a way to make it difficult to talk to them and Dan rests his elbow on the desk, curling his hand into a fist and resting his head against it.

“555-2350,” Jonah says suddenly. Dan spins his chair around and Amy, who had been meddling with the phone she was given, lifts her head to stare at him.

“And you know that... how?” Dan asks and Jonah awkwardly clears his throat.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” Dan and Amy say simultaneously.

“Jesus, okay. I haven't always flown solo. I may have, you know, worked there for a month or two.”

“A month or two?” Dan raises an eyebrow.

“Five month,” Jonah says.

“Five months,” Amy laughs, “At a conspiracy magazine? I mean, sure, why not. Of course you did.”

“Please tell me you left because you got into a fight about Bigfoot. Or was it the Loch Ness Monster?” Dan says, not trying in the least to choke back the smile that's fighting to reveal itself on his face.

“The Loch Ness Monster has nothing to do with this,” Jonah says and then hesitates because he already knew how that sounded. “There was a disagreement, one where I was clearly in the right, thank you very much. What it was about is none of your business. I figured it was best to just part ways—”

“Which means you got fired,” Amy says.

“I didn't get fired! I left. There's a big fucking difference, alright? Whatever. Just forget it.”

“Oh no,” Dan says, picking up his main phone and turning it on, finding it had just enough juice left to make a phone call and then begins to dial, “I am never forgetting this.” He's not sure why he's doing this now, figures that he could at least check and make sure that Jonah was right and maybe leave a message on their voicemail and he's already going over in his head what he wants to say, choosing the best way to keep it short but interesting enough that someone might want to get back to him but he's surprised when a real person actually picks up.

“TTK Magazine.” The masculine voice sounds weary and hoarse, as if whomever it is didn't want to be awake, didn't want to be answering the phone at this hour but there he was anyway. He was either a workaholic or an insomniac and Dan has known his fair share of both. He takes the phone away from his ear and switches it to speaker, laying it down in front of the computer, and the three of them crowd around in a tight semi-circle. “Hello?”

“Hi. Hey. Sorry I'm calling so late—”

“If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have called,” the man says. “Who are you?” He asks the question bluntly, completely straight-forward, no small talk or humor.

“Dan Egan. I work for _The Leviathan_. We're working on—”

“Who's 'we'? Is that like the Royal We or is there someone else there? Sounds like I'm on speaker.” He interrupts again and Dan exhales slowly, scratching at his neck. Maybe this was a bad idea. He looks at Amy and gestures towards the phone and she, too, sighs heavily.

“Amy Brookheimer. Hi.”

“Is that it?” The man queries and they glance to Jonah who says nothing and swallows so Dan reaches over and smacks him on the arm.

“Uh... Hey, Simon. It's Jonah. Jonah Ryan.”

“...Jonah? You're at the _Leviathan_ now?” Simon sounds equally bewildered and amused.

“Not exactly. Kind of. I actually—” He starts to explain but stops when Dan gives him a look. “It's a long story.”

“Well then, Dan, Amy, and Jonah,” Simon says and they can hear a wooden chair creaking as he shifts, the soft noises of typing and the thud of what might have been a mug being placed down onto a desk, “I'm already interested. What could I possibly do for you at almost two in the morning?” Dan could skirt around it, use a lot of big words and vague statements, ramble and swerve away from details, dial up the charm, because he can't count the number of times he's used that tactic on so many other people he's tried to get dirt out of, had them dropping all the pieces of information he's asked for right into the palm of his waiting hand but he has this leaden feeling in his stomach that's telling him it won't work this time around (or maybe it's just all the coffee he's had that day and very little food not agreeing with him). The complete and entire truth, on the other hand, was also out of the question. He has no doubt that this Simon guy would be more willing than most to believe anything that Dan tells him but there was a high risk that if he showed all his cards, they'd be immediately snatched away.

“We're looking into Nuvarin,” Dan says finally. “I was looking through your site earlier and, while you definitely broach a wide variety of... topics, you seem to like to direct the focus consistently on pharmaceutical companies.”

“Okay,” Simon says after a few seconds of silence. “How about you try that again except this time you talk to me like a normal human being and not like you're trying to sell me something.”

“Alright,” Dan says, “There's something fucked up going on at Nuvarin and we're trying to figure out exactly what that is but we're missing a lot of puzzle pieces. It's like we've got all the edges but nothing to go in the middle. And you want to know the truth? You're pretty much our last resort here. At least, our last resort before we've got to start getting really fucking dirty, which I've already kind of started doing by getting a nurse to give me a possibly dead guy's medical records,” he concedes.

“'Possibly dead'?”

“Technically missing,” Dan says. “We tried to find his grave at a cemetery where his father is buried but we got... um... a little side-tracked and never got the chance to follow up on that.”

“Hm,” Simon grunts, considering. “I may have something around here about Nuvarin. Most of it isn't verified but—”

“That's fine,” Amy says.

“Totally fine,” Jonah agrees.

“Then you're welcome to come over and have a look. I'd say come by tomorrow afternoon but since we all seem to be wide awake, you might as well come now. Jonah knows where we are.” He hangs up without saying good-bye and the three of them exchanges glances.

“That went better than expected,” Dan says. “Who's going?” It's a stupid question, he knows. “Fine. We'll take my ca— Shit,” he curses, throws his hands in the air and slides backwards just a few inches. “It's still at the fucking cemetery.”

“Guess we're taking mine then,” Amy says, standing and pulling on her coat.

“He's going to want something from us in return,” Jonah says. “Simon's not into charity.”

“You've only got one thing he'd want to see,” Amy says, tapping the locked drawer in her desk with the toes of her shoe.

“No,” Dan shakes his head. “No.”

“This guy's like Bruce fucking Banner, dude,” Jonah says. “Cool as a goddamn cucumber but you won't like him when he's pissed off.”

“Shit,” Dan repeats and then says it a third time for good measure. “Okay.”

Dan leaves both of his phones behind, plugging them in with a charger from his bag and a borrowed one from Amy's desk and, for lack of a better substitute, he brings their kidnapper's phone with him instead.

\- -

The building that the magazine operates out of is only a few stories tall and made of old brick, a heavy metal door with a row of doorbells, labels slapped next to each one with peeling clear tape, some of the names typed and some scribbled by hand. The third one down says 'TTK' in big block letters, scrawled with a red sharpie and Jonah leans on the button until there's a low buzzing noise as the door unlocks and he pulls it open, walking inside and marching up the stairs as if he owned the place, Dan and Amy trailing behind trying to keep up.

Down a darkly lit hallway to the very end and Jonah stops in front of a frosted glass door, 'Those That Know Magazine Office' taped up on a piece of faded paper and Jonah pauses, hand hovering over the brass doorknob, changing his mind and actually knocking, but he enters before any of them hear a voice telling them to actually come in.

The room is relatively small, with about five desks that appeared to have been taken from other office buildings that had been condemned and there are desktop computers on three of them, ranging in age from ten years old to very recent, as if they could only afford to upgrade them one at a time and the process was incredibly slow. The walls are covered in cork-board which, in turn, is plastered with newspaper clipping, printed papers, and photographs and Dan finds it impossible to tell if they're all connected or separate stories that just happened to begin encroaching on each other's territory. A fishbowl with a single orange goldfish swimming in circles sits next to an ancient coffee machine, which is next to a large printer on a squat file cabinet with drawers that had been left open. Beside that, on a sagging table that looked like it belonged next to somebody's bed, was a fax machine with a red light that blinked seemingly non-stop.

A man that Dan assumes is Simon is seated at a desk at the very back under a small window and he lifts his head when he hears the door open and then slowly stands, unfurling himself from his chair and shuffling over to greet them.

“Jonah Ryan,” he says, pushing his rolled-up sleeves just a bit further over his elbows. “Never thought I'd see you again.” He holds out his right hand leaving Jonah no choice but to either ignore the gesture or give him his left, the handcuff still dangling and Simon glances at it, narrows his eyes and looks as if he's attempting to figure out the story without having to directly ask. “You must be Dan and Amy then,” he says next, turning towards the other two and shaking their hands in turn. “Hm. Handcuffs,” he points to Jonah, “Head injury,” he points to Dan. “Is this related or do you two just get into trouble a lot?”

“It's related,” Dan says and Simon nods, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“Anyway,” Simon says, leading them towards where he had been sitting when they walked in, placing himself on the other side of the desk, “I managed to hunt down some files on Nuvarin. Not as much as I thought but I'm not the most organized person on the planet. There could be more in there somewhere.” He waves his hand in the direction of the file cabinet. “You can look through it if you want. Just, you know, don't steal anything. Here 'ya go.” Simon pushes a stack of pale colored folders towards them and indicates towards the scattered, empty desks behind them. “Make yourselves comfortable. I'll just be here, getting some more work done.” Sitting down, he puts his feet up on the desk and then lifts an immense mound of papers that had been stuck together like a particularly dense book, placing it in his lap and flipping to a page marked by a yellow tab. Highlighter in hand, be begins to read where he apparently had left off, leaving the other three to their own devices and they choose a desk without a computer just a few feet away, Dan and Jonah taking chairs from elsewhere and dragging them over so they could all sit together. There's nothing personal on this desk other than a single framed photo of a young woman with very blonde hair posing with a golden retriever that was smiling, tongue out, as he looked at the camera.

“That's weird, right?” Dan asks in a low voice, still looking at the photo propped up on the desk.

“This whole place is weird,” Amy replies with a whisper. “Let's just get this over with.” They split the pages up between them and, if Dan had expected some light and easy reading, he was horribly mistaken. He's embarrassed with himself for not understanding what he was looking at, feels like he should know what all of this meant. He may not have graduated from the most prestigious university in the country but he wasn't a goddamn idiot except the further and further he got into the documents, the less and less sense was being made. What he does find, though, near the end of his pile, are a stack of photographs taken on a camera that had to be taken to a professional to be developed and all of them seem to be from when the Nuvarin building was being built, pictures of construction equipment and of men talking, pointing, holding up large blueprints. He shows them to the other two who examine them with interest and then Dan takes them back, lifting them into the air and turning to face where Simon was still sitting, reading his enormous tome.

“Why are these in here? And where the hell did you get them?”

“They're construction photos,” Simon says like he doesn't understand why Dan couldn't figure that out. He doesn't answer the second part, about where he got them from and why anybody would be interested enough in the construction of a pharmaceutical company to want to photograph it. It could have been somebody from the company keeping track of the progress, but the angle looked as if whoever was taking them was sitting in a tree on the other side of the road, making sure they weren't seen. How in the world could Simon get his hands on them? Maybe, Dan figures, this is where Jonah picked up his weird ability to find things nobody else seemed to be able to uncover.

“I know. But why,” he tries again and Simon puts his work off to the side and wanders over to them, pulling a chair up and sitting between Dan and Amy, taking the photos from him and shuffling through them, stopping at one in particular.

“Look,” he says, pointing at an image of the foundation being built. “This was taken on,” he flips it over, squinting at the small printed date in the bottom right corner that Dan hadn't noticed, “May 5th, 1997. And then here...” He finds another one where it's only the foundation except, this time, there's dark-colored tarp covering something directly in the middle of the ground. “May 25th, 1997. No changes. Except that.” He points at the misshapen lump under the tarp, just in case. “What is that?”

“I don't know,” Amy says, as if he had actually been asking them if they knew what it could be and were holding out on him.

“Nobody knows,” Simon says, handing the photographs back to Dan. “They're building and then they aren't. And then there's that and suddenly they're building again. What'd they find? Did they get rid of it? Is it still there? I know what you're thinking. Why are these just buried in a file cabinet? They should be all over the internet. They were, for awhile, but somehow they kept disappearing, like they have just one guy and all he does is search for these photos and get rid of them. I wouldn't be surprised. I tried to track down the construction workers but the ones I could find wouldn't talk to me. I started going to Nuvarin at least once a year up until 2010, just to see if I could get anybody willing to tell me anything. The turn-over rate there is suspiciously high.” He takes the papers from each of their hands, shuffles them together into one pile and rifles through them, finally producing a single sheet that he holds up, showing it to each of them as if he's teaching a class. “These are all the names of people who got fired or left in one year.” The list fills up almost the entire length of the page. He finds another and slides it on top of the one he had been showing them. “All replaced by these people. I'm assuming a few of them were let go later.” Dan wants to ask him how in the world he got them but, same as the photographs, he figures he wouldn't get a straight answer.

“Did you actually get anyone to talk to you?” It's unlikely, Dan knows, that there was single sane human out there that would willingly reveal company secrets to a guy who claimed to be a journalist working for a magazine that hardly anyone has ever heard of just hovering around the lobby and the parking lot and Dan wonders why they kept allowing him to come back, why they didn't treat him the same way they were treating Jonah and himself. Maybe they saw him as more of a nuisance than a threat.

“Almost. In early 2013, just before I decided to put this whole thing on the back burner for awhile, a guy--Ronald Something--was leaving the building in the evening. He'd been there for a few years, I'd seen him once or twice before. He actually stopped to listen to what I had to say. I even showed him a few of the photos. He said he would think about it but then he got a message on his phone and, after he looked at it, he seemed spooked. Told me to leave and never come back and then turned around and walked back into Nuvarin.” Dan's so wrapped up in trying to figure out how anybody obsessed with conspiracies could possibly just drop a story and move on to something else that he almost misses the name that Simon had said and he blinks, opens his mouth but Jonah is one small step ahead of him.

“Ronald? Ronald Sharman? Was that the guy?” Jonah leans forward and Simon moves back, takes a moment to think and then nods. “Dan,” Jonah says, turning to look at him as if Dan had been sitting there with noise-canceling headphones on and was entirely checked out of the conversation. “Holy shit.”

“You've talked to him?” Simon asks, sounding almost hopeful but deflating when Dan chuckles.

“Nobody has since 2013. For all we know, you were one of the last people to see him alive.” It's an exaggeration but, at this point, Dan doesn't doubt that it's most likely true.

“Possibly dead, technically missing?” Simon suggests and Amy says that, yeah, it seems to be a sort of running theme here. “I have to ask,” Simon says eventually, after a nearly agonizing few seconds of awkward silence. “What could you guys possibly have that's so important that these people are outwardly harassing you because of it?” There's curiosity in his voice but also tinges of jealousy, envious that he'd been working for so long on this only to have a couple journalists and an ex-employee suddenly stumble upon something so apparently big that the company that merely saw him as a minor irritant all those years were putting effort into causing physical damage to them just to stop whatever it is from getting out. This is what Jonah had mentioned, Dan suspects. Simon doesn't do charity. Dan rubs a hand through his dark hair and breathes out loudly.

“Alright. Look, what we're about to show you... you don't tell a single fucking soul, got it? Not even your goddamn goldfish, do you understand?”

“He wouldn't remember even if I did,” Simon says. “Besides, despite what you may think, I'm very good at keeping secrets when I want to be.” On that remark, Amy pulls the phone out from her purse and turns it on, flipping it lengthwise and pulls up the video, checks to make sure it's at the very beginning and then hands it over to Simon, who glances at each of them individually before pressing play, as if checking to make sure this wasn't just some joke and he wanted to catch them just before they burst into laughter. Dan and Amy don't move their chairs to watch it with him because, for Dan, he didn't need to be staring at it to see what was happening and, with Amy, he knew that if she'd seen something twice, that was plenty. Jonah, on the other hand, scoots his chair sideways just a bit more to observe over his shoulder, seeming just as fascinated by it as he was the first time.

Amy starts going through her phone to distract herself but Dan doesn't have the option, unless he wanted to download a game on the one he brought with him. Instead, he folds his hands loosely in his lap, knees bouncing as he waits for Simon to get to the part they were all waiting for and, even though he's anticipating it, the screeching that emits from the tiny speakers startles him. Simon's eyes widen cartoonishly large and he stops breathing, pauses it just when Jonah starts to run away and rewinds, watches it for a second time and then stops it again.

“This,” he says, starts to hand it to Amy but then takes it back, stares at the screen. “I mean that... son of a bitch. When'd you take this?” He asks Jonah, looks at him specifically.

“Couple of days ago.”

“How'd you get in?” Jonah looks like he's about to tell him, is going to unravel everything but Dan interrupts him, snatches the phone from Simon's hands and gives it to Amy, who puts it back where it had been taken.

“We just did. Although, after Jonah's stunt, I doubt we'll be able to do it again.”

“You sure you won't let me have a copy?” Simon inquires. “We've got some pretty advanced equipment here.” Explains why they can only afford to have one computer that came out sometime in the past year and the other two are ancient desktops, Dan surmises. “I mean, I don't know how to use it but Audra does. She'd have that thing picked apart like a turkey at Thanksgiving.” Dan's instinct is to completely blow off the suggestion because allowing someone he only just met to have complete access to one of the only tangible pieces of evidence they have and trust that Simon wouldn't go back on his word and share with the entire world makes him feel on edge. Then again, if there's even a slight chance that somebody might be able to discover even a single frame that might solve everything or, at least, nudge them closer in that direction, it could be worth the risk. Maybe if they did wind up posting it, they'd be doing the three of them a favor by directing Nuvarin's ire onto somebody else for awhile instead.

The silent communication between the three of them—a discussion made only with eyebrows, the shifting of eyes and slight movements of their mouths—carries on for a minute or two and Dan finds it unnerving, doesn't enjoy the thought that he was close enough with anybody that they had reached a point where they could talk to each other without using words. When they finish, seemingly coming to a satisfying agreement, Amy takes the phone with the video back out but withholds it, staring Simon dead in the eyes, bending towards him as if whatever she had to say next was the most important thing in the universe.

“Here's the deal,” she says, “We give this to you. We watch you make a copy. You do whatever weird stuff you want to do to it. As soon as you find something you send it to me.” She reaches for a random piece of paper from the pile they had been reading from and carelessly scribbles down her work email on the back with a pen she found in a cup on the desk. “You send it to me and then you delete that video and any traces of it from your computer. Pretend like you never even had it. What video? Who fucking knows. You don't know about any video. Got it?”

“I got it,” Simon says, holds out his hand and, at first, Amy thinks he wants the phone but he pushes it away and she shakes his hand instead, slapping the phone into his palm when she let's go. He stands and walks over to the desk with the brand new computer, tugs a bundle of tangled cords from a drawer and pulls them apart until he finds one that'll fit. He sits down and goes through the process of transferring the video over and, fifteen minutes later, he unplugs the phone and brings it back over to them. “Done.”

They say their goodbyes but, just before they walk out the door into the hallway, Simon stops them.

“Hey, listen, if you need anything at all, no matter what, you call us, alright? With shit like this, the list of people you can rely on gets shorter and shorter by the hour but we'll have your backs. If your editor won't publish this when all is said and done, you've got us. We may not seem like much but we've got a lot of scarily devoted readers. And we've got a top notch lawyer.”

“Issy's still here?” Jonah asks, sounds incredulous and Simon merely shrugs.

“Well, uh, thanks,” Dan says and, for once, he actually means it.

\- -

They drive back to the _Leviathan_ office because none of them could agree on where else to go and the ride is surprisingly quiet, the only sound from the rushing wind and the ambient sounds drifting in from the window that Dan had rolled down just enough to be able to stick his hand through the space if he really wanted. It's cooler outside than he expected and the sky is lightening, turning a bluish sort of purple that he thought might match the bruises on his face. But that was stupid, Dan figures, laughing at himself. What a stupid thought. Amy turns on the radio at some point but it only lasts for a few minutes before she scoffs and jams her finger against the button to turn it off again. There's nothing worth listening to, especially at this weird time in the morning. Dan can hear Jonah hitting the dangling piece of his handcuff against the inside handle on his door but he can't tell if it's an absent-minded movement or on purpose just to remind them that it was still there.

There is nothing else to do but wait, same as before. Wait for an email, wait for a box of potentially useless documents that used to belong to someone who may no longer even be alive. Dan thinks about what Simon told them: about the startlingly large number of people fired each year, about Ronald almost willing to talk but vanishing at the last moment, about the photos he showed them, photos that Dan realizes too late that he should have asked for copies of before they left.

“Idiot,” he says to himself, head leaning against the window, and Amy turns to glance at him.

“What?”

“We didn't ask for copies. We didn't even ask to borrow them.”

“Oh,” she says, and then: “Shit.”

“We can go back.”

“Right now?”

“Not right now.”

“Good,” Amy says, “Because I wasn't planning on turning around anyway.”

“We didn't ask for goddamn copies of those photos,” Jonah says a few minutes later, sitting forward and leaning between the two front seats and Dan lets out a slow exhale through his nose.

The parking lot is, of course, still as empty as they left it and Amy parks in her usual spot, slams the door shut with more force than was necessary and both she and Jonah head for the doors but Dan lingers behind, moving from one foot to the other, scratching at the back of his head. Jonah notices before Amy does and he stops, spins around, a hand holding the door open and Dan can hear Amy ask what the hold up was, what happened and he watches her come back outside, coat swishing around the backs of her knees.

“Dan,” she says. “What's your problem?”

“I need to borrow your car,” Dan says and Amy frowns, actually glances up at Jonah as if Dan had just spoken to her in a foreign language and she thought maybe he'd understand. She looks back to him and then walks until she's just a foot or two away, hands on her hips and then at her sides.

“Why? I mean, no, you can't. But why?”

“There's something I need at my apartment. I'm not going to have you chauffeur me around until I can find mine again.”

“So take a taxi,” Amy says, arms crossed over her chest. “You're not taking my car anywhere. Especially not with this,” she says, untangling her arms to tap at the side of his head that was still tender and he flinches away, leans to the side, away from her touch.

“Jesus, Amy. Ten minutes. Twenty, there and back.” He takes a step forward and she doesn't take one back and, out of the corner of his eye, he can see Jonah coming towards them.

“What's going on?” Jonah asks and Dan's about to tell him to mind his own goddamn business for just once since they've known each other, for crying out loud, but Amy talks over him, shoulders lifting.

“He wants to borrow my car.”

“Why?” Jonah asks Amy but she just shrugs so he turns to Dan. “Why?”

“Just give me the fucking keys!” Dan raises his voice, doesn't mean to but it just happens and the two people standing in front of him blink slowly, neither of them responding right away to his outburst but Amy finally reaches into one of her pockets, taking the keys into a fist and dropping them into Dan's waiting palm. “Thank you.” It comes out sounding exasperated and annoyed and Amy rolls her eyes.

“What-the-fuck-ever, Dan. Do what you have to do.” She leaves, striding back to where she had originally been going but Jonah hesitates.

“What, Jonah?”

“Where are you going?”

“To my apartment,” Dan says and then walks away.

\- -

For all intents and purposes, Dan really did originally plan on going directly to his apartment. He hadn't been entirely sure what he actually planned on doing once he got there, because there wasn't much of anything he had left behind that he needed. Everything important was in his bag, which was sitting beside him in the passenger seat and he's fifteen minutes away from the city before he realizes that he left both of his phones behind and he's twenty-five minutes away from the city before he realizes he's not going to his apartment anymore. Did he black out? No, he must not have because he would be in a ditch on the side of the road if that had happened, but it didn't explain where his brain had decided to take him instead.

He slows down, drifts over to the side of the road and stops, hands clutching the steering wheel tightly, fingers curling around it, thumbs hitting it to a beat that he doesn't recognize. Turning on the GPS that was in the vehicle, he mindlessly pushes buttons, tapping the screen until he brings up a list of recent destinations, the city at the top, the diner Amy had found them at right after, addresses that Dan didn't know filling out the rest of the list. He's half tempted just to pick one and see where it takes him but that was ridiculous, he wouldn't do that. He wasn't and never would be quite that far gone.

You know, says a voice in his head, Nuvarin isn't far from here. It's almost three in the morning. Nobody'll be home. The voice sounds suspiciously like Jonah and that worries him, but he also decides that it makes a decent point in some way or another. Dan had never been particularly good at waiting, anyway, despite how he likes to convince himself otherwise.

He punches in the company name and it's the first and only address given to him as an option. He watches the small machine calculate his route, stares as the map shifts and loads thick and thin lines of roads and yellow patches of ground and he flicks on his turn signal, pulling back out onto the highway.

\- -

The structure is dark, save for a couple windows on the very top floor that were bright white squares as if the building had eyes and was watching him as he sat in the middle of the road, engine still running but the brake on so he could sit with his hands in his lap and not have to be concerned with starting to roll away. He can't decide if it looks more ominous alone and surrounded by trees in the dark or in the light but, either way—now with everything he's started to uncover so far under his belt—the place was beginning to feel more and more menacing. He sits there for what feels like hours, just staring and maybe this was it, maybe he was officially losing his fucking mind.

He backs up, turns and drives up to the security gate, to the small box that a man was supposed to be sitting inside but, once again, it's empty and he wonders if there was ever any intention of having a guard sit there or if, for most people, just seeing it tended to put them off even trying to get in any further. Repeating Jonah's earlier action, he pushes a button that looks important and the heavy gate swings open but he doesn't move. After a few minutes, it closes again and he reaches back out of his window to push the button a second time. He chooses a space as far away from the building as possible and then climbs out of the car, shutting the door quietly and shoves his hands in his pockets, leaning against the vehicle. It had rained while he drove and he could feel water soaking in through his jacket but these clothes were already going to go to the dry cleaners anyway.

He could try to go in but he's sure that the doors would be locked and he highly doubted that anybody who happened to be inside would be willing to let him in. Besides, what would he do if he was able to just walk in? Go back upstairs to search for where Jonah had found that inhuman being. Find the door to the basement and wander aimlessly, hoping to uncover whatever Simon had shown them in those eighteen-year-old photographs. It couldn't be that simple, Dan thinks, shaking his head. The answers weren't going to be waiting for him in a dark basement, out in the open and entirely unprotected. Nobody, especially journalists, are ever that lucky.

The phone he still had with him, the one that never belonged to him but to a man who had stuffed him into the trunk of a car, begins to ring and he's too curious to ignore it, goes around to the other side of the vehicle and opens the passenger side door, leaning over to find it in his bag, has it in his hand but it's too late, it stops making noise and he sighs, flips it open to check and see what the number had been even though he knows it won't be familiar. His spine suddenly begins to crawl and he rises, turning around just in time to see a figure standing right in front of him, placed just in the right spot for his face to be almost entirely hidden.

“Who the hell—” Dan starts to say but he's interrupted.

“You shouldn't have come back here,” the man says and then stuns him with a taser right in the neck.

\- -

Dan wakes up and he's in a room. There are no windows here, no illumination except for a single strip of a florescent light hung horizontally across the low ceiling. He's seated in a metal chair but isn't bound to it, nothing wrapped around his wrists as if whoever put him here knew he wouldn't (or couldn't) try to get away and a large table is in front of him reflecting the bright light, highlighting scratches and signs of wear on it's empty surface. It's so deathly quiet in there that he can hear the bulb above him buzzing, can hear his own heart slamming in his ears and he finally touches his neck, feels the burns left behind and winces.

Standing up, he walks around, moves first in a circle around the table and then around the perimeter of the room, stopping in front of the heavy door, pressing his hands flat against it but he feels nothing but the cool metal against his sweaty palms. He fucked up, fucked up big time and knows that there's no easy way out, no making a run for it with Jonah holding onto his arm, no sending strangers crashing through windshields at fifty miles-per-hour. Curling one of his hands into a fist, he begins banging on the door, despite feeling that it was most likely a pointless gesture.

“You can't keep me in here,” he says, not knowing if anybody could even hear him.

“Yes we can,” says a voice suddenly, sounding as if it were filling up the entire room and Dan jumps, looks wildly around but he can't find the source of the noise.

“Fuck you,” Dan says weakly. “No you can't.”

“I'm not going to argue like this with you, Mister Egan,” the voice says and it's one he's heard before. He closes his eyes, thinks back to all of the people he's spoken to recently and then he hears it, incredibly clear: No, I've had enough of dead bodies, Mister Egan. But, just as during the phone call, it reminds him of something else he's heard already as well, something he can't quite put his finger on.

“Who are you?”

“Someone who admires your perseverance,” he says. “Where are your friends?”

“Obviously not here,” Dan says, speaking to the ceiling even though he doesn't know for sure that that's where the voice is coming from but it feels better than staring at the wall or the floor.

“Obviously not. Now, I've looked through your bag but all I found was a phone that doesn't belong to you and a few papers of no importance. Where is the video? You know,” the man says before Dan has an opportunity to respond and Dan wonders if there really is a camera in here or if he was just that predictable, “Everything that's happened and will happen doesn't have to continue.” He pauses and Dan hears something that he misinterprets as static or interference but turns out to be him laughing. “Listen to me. Sorry. I get overdramatic sometimes. Let me put it this way: If you give me the video, I won't bother you anymore.”

“I don't have it,” Dan says.

“That's very vague,” the voice replies. “I know you don't actually have it currently in your possession. Do you mean somebody else has it? Please tell me who so I can go get it.”

“I don't know who has it,” Dan says and, in a twisted sort of way, he's telling the truth. Simon has a copy but Dan has no idea which one of his staff is currently watching it and the original was left with Amy but, for all he knows, Jonah currently has it in his giant hands.

“Nobody will believe you,” the voice says, apropos of nothing. “No matter how much evidence you think you'll find, there isn't anybody sane out there who will believe whatever story you write. Not that it would matter much, either way. I know how to make things like that disappear. Well, I mean, not me personally. But I have somebody who does. A few phone calls, some typing at a computer and there never was an article. The video... well, that'll probably get passed around but it'll be revealed to be a hoax, just some short horror film by an amateur filmmaker.” He sounds bored as he speaks, as if this isn't the first time he's given this spiel to someone or not the first time this has happened and Dan is beginning to think that maybe that's true. “And then,” he sighs, “There's you killing someone.” Dan's face goes pale and as much as he liked to think he didn't bother him, that there was a choice and he made the right one, it still did very much so, enough that he feels his stomach lurch and his hands go numb. “He's not dead, actually. Surprisingly.

"But he could be. And you, Mister Egan, killed him. That will be what the police believe anyway. I can read the article now: Leviathan journalist, Dan Egan, suffers mental breakdown, becomes obsessed with Nuvarin and it's CEO, Theodore Nagel. Murders an employee, injures another.” He pauses. “Obviously, I'm not a journalist. Someone else will be hired to take care of that. Maybe Amy? Or Jonah. Which one do you think is the better writer?”

“They wouldn't,” Dan says.

“You'd be surprised,” the voice tells him. “So, to recap: no video and no cooperation?”

“Fuck you,” Dan says again with about as much firmness as he can manage, hands curling into fists at his sides.

“Hmm. You can't blame a guy for trying to talk it out like a human being. What happens next is on you, just know that.” He disappears, no faint buzzing or any signs that the line was still open and Dan peers around because, for all he knows, nothing was being done to anybody, that he had just said that to scare him and would make him wait it out for a few minutes or hours until he couldn't take the silence anymore, but it's also entirely possible that the threat wasn't empty in the least and he's not sure how long he can weigh his options before it's too late.

Dan paces and then kicks at the table, cursing as it sends a jolt of pain up his leg. In any other situation that wasn't exactly life or death (for either himself or somebody he doesn't actively hate), the easy decision would be the one that ended with him on top after having climbed over the metaphorical corpses of his peers. As long as he came out the victor in the end, it didn't matter who's face he had to step on to get there. It's how it had always been, for as long as he could possibly remember. For some reason, right now, he's finding it incredibly difficult to justify making a very similar choice as he stands there, cut off from the rest of the world, locked in a room that was hopefully somewhere inside a pharmaceutical company he's been trying to get a closer peek into, where they didn't allow anybody else to look.

At worst, in the past, the consequences of his upward movements ended with other people getting jobs not comparable to his own, taking the fall for a problem that he had created which left him with a pat on the back and the other person a severe reprimand (and, once, being fired). Now, the consequences of his inaction would most likely end in bloodshed. It's an over-exaggeration, quite probably, but one that still brings his feet dangerously close to the edges of panic. Just give him what he wants, a voice says in the back of his head, a voice that doesn't sound like Amy or Jonah or even himself. Give it to him. It'll buy you some time. Time to do what? But it didn't matter if there was an answer to that question. All he needed was time.

“Okay,” he says, too quietly and he clears his throat, pulls on his tie that he couldn't believe he was still wearing. “Okay,” he says louder, says it again and maybe it didn't matter, maybe nobody was listening.

“Okay what?” The voice, just as clear as it had been before.

“I'll... I'll give you the damn video, alright?”

“You will? I'm happy to hear you've finally come to your senses. I'm sure you'll want to give me terms or choose where we meet and I want you to know: I respect that but also: shut up. I will have someone escort you to wherever the video currently is. You will give it to him and he will leave. Are there any copies I should know about?” He doesn't know. He doesn't know about what Simon and the others at _TTK_ have on their computers. Either he doesn't know or he's testing him but Dan decides to lie and hope that luck decided to be on his side just for a few more seconds today.

“No copies.” Someone once told him: the best way to lie is to keep the details out of the equation entirely. If you ramble on too long it becomes too suspicious and making up everything on the fly means that if you're quizzed on the story later, you'd have to recall every word you said because one slip-up, one moment of accidentally saying the man's shirt was blue when the first time you said it was red and the whole thing falls apart like a sandcastle being destroyed by a tidal wave.

“Good,” the voice says and Dan hadn't realized he was holding his breath until he feels himself let it go. “You've been a delight. Someone will come get you in a minute.” Gone again. Dan rubs his hands over his face, wipes sweat from his palms onto his pants. He has no way of knowing what else, if anything, these people know. They're surprisingly unaware of their early morning visit to their conspiracy theorist friends and don't seem overly concerned with what else Dan, Amy, and Jonah may have discovered, although it might be likely that—same as the way they treated Simon—none of what they might have believed them to have left seemed to be much of a danger to the security of the company. Anybody who might have revealed everything had disappeared: one a little over two years ago and the other, just yesterday morning.

Dan had a surprising amount of faith in not only himself, but in Amy and, god forbid, Jonah, that this wasn't going to be the end. Anything else he was going to think was cut short when he hears the door open and a large man stands in the doorway, telling him to get moving, they've got to get back to the city.

\- -

Dan says nothing during the entire trip back, the stranger now behind the wheel of Amy's car, even though there are hundreds of insults just waiting to be spit out in the man's face. He wants to tell him that he was the one who broke his friend's fingers, that it was him who crashed the car into the tree and watched as his other friend went sailing through glass, just to see how he'd react but he's too tired, too utterly worn down to bother. The city is starting to wake up to another day of grey skies and the promise of more rain. People in suits are already beginning to stride down the sidewalk, newspapers and briefcases tucked under their arms, making their way to the subway or the closest place to buy a decent cup of coffee.

He recognizes a few vehicles that he sees almost every day, most likely belonging to a few of the other people who also worked in this building, something that Dan forgets. He and the other journalists call it the Leviathan Building but they know none of them own it. They're just paying to share the space. There's also a police car parked right near the doors and the man driving turns to look distrustfully at Dan, as if he had somehow been able to contact his co-workers without the use of any technology and he grimaces, holds up his hands and shrugs. Wasn't me.

“Go on then,” the man says once they've exited the vehicle, gestures towards the building because he doesn't know where they're going, he's just there to pretend to be a friend or a source, somebody who was supposed to be there. He's got Dan's bag with him, slung over his shoulder and Dan wants it back, tries to reach for it but it's pulled away. He leads him to the elevator and the ride is awkward, made even more so by a third person getting on after them, having had caught up at some point and he just focuses on his shoes, counting the seconds until they reach their floor.

Amy is at her desk with Jonah, speaking in low voices with a scrawny police officer and the three of them turn to look when they hear footsteps, a melting pot of confused and dazed expressions greeting them as they walk towards them.

“Jesus Christ, Dan,” Amy says, starts to say something else but then sees the man with him, gives him a once over, arms crossed. “Who the fuck is that?” She doesn't wait for a response. “Just going to your apartment, huh? You drove off over three fucking hours ago,” she says, anger vibrating in her voice and Dan stares at her briefly before turning his attention to the others. The police officer seems to be simply taking in everything currently occurring and Jonah is shifting back and forth from wanting to make himself appear very small and also rush forward to stand beside Amy and yell at Dan right along with her. The handcuff bracelet he had been wearing is gone and Dan figures that the police officer must have unlocked it, wonders what story Jonah told her about why he was wearing it in the first place. It wasn't unlike Dan to ditch Amy--not when he thought the moment called for it--but, with their current situation, he doesn't blame either of them for making the call to the authorities.

“Is everything alright here?” The police officer finally says, coming up behind Amy and Dan coughs.

“Everything's fine,” Dan says. “I... uh, I did go to my apartment. I must have fallen asleep.”

“And him?” Jonah asks. “Who the fuck is that guy?” He repeats Amy's question, points as if he was making sure that Dan remembered he was there.

“I met him on the way up,” Dan says. “I'm supposed to give him something. I guess I forgot.” He puts emphasis on the 'give him something', makes sure to look at both Amy and Jonah, hoping that, somehow, at least one of them might understand. The police officer looks as if she doesn't believe a single word he's saying, as if she's preparing to ask if he's really sure everything is alright, but there isn't much she can do if nobody wants to be honest so, instead, she sighs almost exasperatedly and adjusts her hat.

“Well, I'm glad to see this situation has resolved itself. I'll head out. You have yourselves a nice day.” She gives the man behind Dan a wide berth as she walks past like she can just tell that he's not the best kind of news and Amy waits for the elevator doors to close before speaking once again.

“What the hell happened?”

“I'll tell you later,” Dan says. “Just give him the video.”

“I'm sorry?” Amy asks, tilting her head, eyes widening with anger and Jonah takes a step forward, lifting a hand, and says:

“Hold up. You want us to... what?”

“The video,” Dan says slower. “Give him the video.”

“Absolutely not,” Jonah says right before Amy asks Dan if he's sure.

“Yes, he's sure,” the man says. “Just hand it over and i'll be out of your hair.”

“Dan...” Amy says with a warning tone.

“Amy.”

“Dan!” Jonah says, moving another step forward, grasping Dan's arm tightly and shaking him just a bit.

“Jonah.” None of them say a thing for a moment and Dan can hear the man getting restless.

“Fine,” Amy says, walking over to where her purse sat on an unused chair and she roots around in it, taking out the phone and slamming it down into Dan's waiting hand. Dan, in turn, spins around and drops it into the large hand of the man behind him and watches as he drops it on the floor, smashing it with the heel of his heavy boot. Jonah curses, Amy throws her arms over her head as if the ceiling was about to collapse on her and Dan freezes. He knows there's another copy out there, that this wasn't the only one, that he could have an entire cardboard box of duplicates in a room somewhere, but watching it be obliterated is still a difficult concept to wrap his head around, even with it happening right in front of him.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” the man says and then leaves. No goodbye, no further promises that they will be left alone. Amy shoves Dan enough to send him stumbling backwards, hands pushing hard into his shoulders and Jonah kneels down on the carpet and begins to pick up the broken pieces, pulling them into a pile.

“He didn't have to do that,” Jonah says sadly, looks up at Dan. “Why'd you give it to him?” Because, Dan wants to tell them both, I thought you'd be fucking dead if I didn't. Instead, he says:

“I'm fine, thanks for asking. I just got tasered and woke up in a locked, windowless room with a disembodied voice mocking me and giving me vague threats if I didn't give him what he wanted. But whatever, let's worry about the phone.”

“Fuck you, Dan,” Amy says, shoving him for a second time.

“You called the police?” Dan asks after a moment of silence.

“Jonah called them,” Amy says. “I didn't exactly stop him,” she admits quietly. “Why'd you go back there?”

“I don't know.”

“Well it was a great plan,” Jonah says sarcastically, finally getting to his feet, dumping the pieces of his phone that he had managed to scrape up into a nearby trashcan. “Really good going there, Egan.”

“TTK still has their copy. Miraculously, our friends at Nuvarin don't seem to know about that.”

“Yeah, but I told him to delete it as soon as they found something,” Amy says and both she and Dan turn to Jonah and shout: “Call Simon!”

\- -

A woman answers the phone when Jonah calls the magazine to explain their situation to her and she calmly waits for him to stop rambling almost incoherently before saying that she was still working on it and that she promised not to delete it. She asks if they want them to send the copy back and Jonah glances at Amy and Dan who both shake their heads in unison. By the time Jonah hangs up, Kent has showed up and he gives them a once over, saying that he doesn't want to know, that it was too early, and then walks to his office and slams the door. Other people are starting to wander in as well and the three of them stand there as if lost in a field or surrounded by a zombie hoard before wordlessly agreeing to leave.

They wind up at a nearby diner none of them had been to before, sitting together at a booth by a window with the blinds closed tightly, blocking out any morning light that dared to intrude on their personal space. The coffee is bitter and boiling hot and Amy orders a plate of pancakes and three forks, despite the fact that the other two showed no interest in food. Dan is positive that he wouldn't be able to eat but then the food actually arrives, golden brown and steaming, and he's eaten an entire one on his own before the other two had even picked up their utensils.

They were in way over their heads but none of them were willing to be the one to verbalize it.

“We have to go back.” Amy drops her fork with a clatter when Jonah says it and Dan chokes on the sip of coffee he had just attempted to take, swallowing what didn't wind up on the table and wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You're kidding,” Amy says, blinks at Jonah when he shrugs. “You're not kidding. Need I remind you that things didn't turn out so well when Dan did that a few hours ago?”

“Yeah, but he was by himself.”

“You want us to run in with cameras and hope that at least one of us manages to find something before we're all caught?” Amy snorts, sits back, the cushion letting out a rush of air through the cracked fake leather.

“I mean, we'd plan it a little better than that,” Jonah says. “What else can we do? What other options are there?”

“Anything but that,” Amy says so Jonah turns to Dan who was next to him, stares down at him, putting a hand on his arm.

“Dan,” he says. “You know this could work. This is fucking it. We've been followed and shot at and kidnapped because of this goddamn story. Do you want to just walk away?”

“Not exactly...” Dan admits.

“For crying out loud,” Amy groans into her hands. “No matter what I do or what I say,” she mutters to herself but just loud enough that the other two could hear her, “You'll fucking do it anyway. 'I'm just going back to my apartment, Amy'. 'You win, we won't really go back to Nuvarin, Amy, even though we absolutely will'. Fine,” she says to them, moving her hands away and hitting the table. “We'll do it your way. Why not. I got myself involved, I'm not going to bail on you morons now. So how's this going to work exactly?”

“We're going to strap on football helmets and go running headfirst into the belly of the fucking beast,” Jonah says and he looks like he's ready to bolt any minute, that he's going to stand up and run all the way there if he had to so Dan grabs the sleeve of his jacket because he feels like that's one of the only things holding him back.

“Yes,” Dan says, “But no. Your solution is to just run in blindly and hope for the best—”

“Which is suicide,” Amy says, giving Jonah a withering look when he glares at her. “What? Am I wrong?”

“Look... I need a shower, I need to get changed, I need to go get my fucking car somehow. And I swear to God, Jonah,” Dan says, “If you pull the same fucking stunt I did and run off there by yourself I will find you and cave your giant head in.” Jonah seems like he actually wants to argue, most likely about the taunt directed at his head than anything else but his phone jingling cuts him off and he take it out, studies the message and then looks up at Dan and Amy.

“It's uh... it's Simon. He says they've got something we need to see.”

\- -

Despite the sense of urgency that seemed to be emanating from the phone with each word that had been typed to them, they decide to part ways for a short period, to clean up and clear their heads for whatever was going to be revealed to them next and Amy reluctantly drops them off at Jonah's apartment, agreeing to meet them later back at the _Leviathan_ in exactly two hours.

“Two hours,” she says to them before driving off, lifting two fingers in the air. “Two hours.”

The place is still a mess, the window untouched, the couch damp from rain that had blown in, bullet holes still drilled into the wall and Dan's laptop a broken mess on the coffee table. Jonah disappears into his room, shutting the door loudly behind him and Dan sits on the floor in between the table and couch, pokes at his computer before finding Jonah's with nothing more than a drained battery, waiting for them, resting carefully in the corner of the piece of furniture he was leaning against and he slams it closed.

He falls asleep for almost forty-five minutes, thanks to the cool breeze blowing on the back of his neck, listening to the ambient sounds of outside mixed with the distant rushing of water from Jonah's shower. He feels someone kicking at his foot and he lifts his head from where it had been resting on the couch and peers up to see Jonah looming over him in clean clothes, hair still wet.

“Here,” Dan says, picking up Jonah's computer with one hand and passing it up towards him. “We might need this.”

“Right,” Jonah says, clutching the machine to his chest as he watches as Dan pulls himself to his feet and yawns. He looks like he wants to say something to Dan but, for some reason, changes his mind at the last minute.

“Can I go home now?” Dan asks, already halfway down the hall before Jonah manages to pack up his things and catch up to him.

\- -

Nothing at his own apartment has changed and, for that, he knows he should be grateful. There are no signs of someone having broken in and rifled through his things (unless it was done expertly, the person or persons involved making sure to put everything back exactly the way they had found it but Dan doesn't think about it too hard, can't let himself get any more paranoid than he already was; that road was dark and lonely and he refused to continue down that direction) and he tells Jonah to sit on the couch and not move no matter what before shuffling off to his bathroom.

After that, it all seems to be one thing after the other, as if it's just a normal morning: shower, shave, put on clothes. He pretends, just for a moment, that this was another ordinary day until he looks at himself in the mirror after washing his face and he looks wrecked, bruises just around his hairline, dark circles under his eyes. There's a landline phone that he rarely uses on his desk and he picks up the receiver, hears the tone that tells him he has a voicemail and, when he listens to it, it's a police officer from the town the cemetery is located in informing him that they had towed his vehicle and that he could come down there at any time to get it back, as long as he's willing to pay the fine for it, of course.

He rummages through the drawers in his desk but there's nothing in there that he needs. In a perfect world, Dan could go back to bed, he could lay down just for a few hours and call in sick to work but this world has shown itself to be anything but perfect. They were ten minutes past the two hour time limit Amy had given them and Jonah was going through Dan's kitchen cabinets.

Definitely not perfect.

\- -

Amy chides them for their lateness which Dan blames on Jonah, despite the fact that it was entirely probable that it was Dan's fault but, either way, Amy says that she didn't care who's fucking fault it was, she said two hours and she meant it, goddammit.

The _TTK_ offices look exactly the way they had been when they left, the papers Simon had given them to sort through left abandoned where they had been dropped on the desk Dan and the other two had been seated at earlier that morning. In fact, the only change was that Simon was now behind an entirely different desk, while a young woman sat at his, working in front of their only up-to-date desktop. Both Simon and the woman lift their heads simultaneously to see who had walked in and they stand together as well for a moment, but only the woman walks over to them.

“Does anyone else actually work here?” Amy asks and the woman laughs.

“Everyone just kind of shows up when they can or want to,” Simon says from where he stood. “Most of our writers live in other states or do a lot of traveling. We don't see them much. Audra, Issy, and myself are the only ones who live in the city.” Dan had worked at a website very briefly before being hired at the _Leviathan_ that handled itself in an incredibly similar fashion: show up when you wanted, do what you pleased and what had to be done to fulfill whatever requirements were necessary to finish your story, and hand it in on time to the editor that tried to be more like a Cool Uncle than their boss. It had seemed like a good deal at the time but Dan had grown to quickly hate that sort of environment. It was one thing to give your writers a long leash when it came to certain things but he found he got suspicious and concerned looks whenever he would show up in the office more than three times a week, just to sit and get a few hours of work done in the middle of the day. He liked to run around and talk to people and go places as much as the next person, but nothing much tended to get done if there was only a minimum amount of structure. (That had been where Dan had met Amy, who had been there for at least two years longer than he had and stayed another year after Dan left. Kent had wanted a new hire, a new face, and had asked Dan if he knew anybody who might be interested.)

“Anyway. Dan, Amy,” Audra says, shaking their hands with a limp grip, as if touching them was the last thing she wanted to do but had been taught that this gesture was appropriate when meeting new people and she was going to be damned if she didn't do it each and every time. She turns to Jonah but simply looks up at him with a vague sort of displeasure. “Come on,” she says, giving her full attention back to Dan and Amy as if Jonah had been a mess of lint and cobwebs she had only just noticed in the corner but decided to deal with later, “Come here.” She leads them to the desk, takes up her place in front of the computer once more and brings up three separate windows of programs, all with slightly different versions of the video, paused and waiting. “Simon called me, I guess pretty soon after you guys left. He told me there was something important he needed me to work on so I rushed down here. And let me just say, first of all,” she says, looking over her shoulder at them, “Holy shit. I mean, holy shit, this is pretty great. I've never seen anything like this before. The only thing similar I can think of is Spellmeyer Farm but, eh,” she shrugs. “That was a whole fucking other thing.” Dan wasn't sure if he was supposed to know what that was or if she just assumed it was common knowledge and he glances to Jonah who shakes his head in a 'don't ask me' sort of way. Simon wanders over to them, standing on the other side of the desk, one hand in his pocket.

“Sorry to hear about having to give up the original video,” he says. “We've been there.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, awkwardly. It was his own fault that had to happen in the first place. If only he hadn't— There was no time for self-pity. “What did you want to show us?”

“Okay. Well, I went through it frame-by-frame, just to see if there was anything I could catch visually that was moving too quickly or what-have-you but there isn't much to say there unless you want to see the faces of the employees that came scrambling from their rooms when Alien Guy starts shrieking. Could be useful, though, so I saved those in a folder. Next, I put it into this program,” Audra brings up one of the other windows, “And tried to mess around with the video itself. Lighten it and all that. Try to see if we could get a clearer picture, you know? Unfortunately, I couldn't get much. The video itself wasn't the best quality,” she says, shooting at fleeting look to Jonah, who was standing to her right and grimaces back at her. “I made it brighter, toyed with the exposure, but it was mostly a pixel-y, blurry mess. This is the best I could do.” She makes the paused screen of the video bigger and the three of them bend closer around her to stare at the figure. There were more defined lines of muscles and the shape of the face which, to Dan at least, appeared oddly distinct now that he really looked it, though he had trouble pinpointing where he knew it from, same as he felt when he heard the voice of the man who had spoken to him those two times before.

“You'd think seeing this would make me feel better somehow,” Amy says, eyes narrowing as she scrutinizes the image. “You know, getting more of an idea what this asshole looks like.”

“What the fuck is that,” Jonah says, putting the tip of his finger to the screen, tapping against a strange shape, just to the left of where the humanoid shape was pushed up against the glass. Audra brushes his hand away and zooms in, the four of them now with their heads practically touching as they attempt to study what Jonah had seen, Simon looking over the top of the screen, staring at it upside-down.

“Is that...” Audra says, moves the picture around, zooms in again and then out, “Is that another person? How did I not notice that before?”

“Could be a shadow,” Dan suggests.

“Of what?” Audra asks. “His?” She points at the larger figure and then trails her hand down diagonally away from his head towards the right. “Look at the light. His shadow would be over there.”

“So there's somebody else in there with him? It. Whatever,” Amy says. “Do they show up anywhere else?”

“Let me see,” Audra says, sitting down, starting to fast-forward and rewind until she gets to the exact spot that Jonah began to film the window and then goes one frame at a time.

“There!” Jonah cries out a few seconds later and Audra pauses the video, all of them staring closely once more and, just slightly clearer on the left, is a dark shape of what seemed to be another man.

“This is great and all,” Dan says, “But it doesn't matter if we can't fucking see who it is.”

“It actually does matter,” Audra says, “Because it might give me the answer to what I really wanted to show you guys.” The third window she had brought up is called forward, a stretch of sound waves spreading across the screen, a particular patch of it selected between two darker bars. “I isolated the audio, started messing around with that last. Most of it is just Jonah's mouth-breathing and him talking to himself but then we get to the good part and all hell breaks loose. We've got the screeching, and then people talking when they come out to see what's going on. Now, these programs I'm using are impressive but they aren't the best in the world so, you know, there's a lot that I can't hear. But I screwed around anyway and right here,” she points at the area she had selected. “Well, listen.” She hushes them despite the fact that she was the only one currently talking and turns up the volume as loud as it would go, pushing the spacebar on the keyboard.

There's a crackling, static and the unmistakable howling from the figure but then, brought up and just audible enough that the words were clear, they hear a voice say: “Teddy, stop it!” It reaches the end of her specific selection and starts again, repeating it three times before Audra hits the spacebar again and stops it.

“Just to be completely fucking sure,” Jonah says after an almost unsettling silence, “We all heard the same thing, right?”

“'Teddy, stop it',” Dan and Amy say synchronously.

“Yeah. That's what I thought,” Jonah says, swallowing and pulling at the collar of his shirt.

“I'm assuming this 'Teddy' is a shortened version of 'Theodore',” Simon coughs, “As in Theodore Nagel, current CEO of Nuvarin?”

“Well, I mean... You can't say...” Dan stammers, gestures towards the screen with a flailing hand that he then runs through his hair.

“Looking at the time the person says that compared to the actual video...” Audra says, maneuvers two of the screens, pulling and pushing at them with the mouse until they were side-by-side and she matches up the times, shushes them once more and hits 'play'. It's said just barely a few seconds before the rest of the employees begin to emerge from their offices, said in the brief moment where none of those people, nor Jonah himself, could have uttered those three words. “I had to do a lot of work to make that discernible. I mean, it was so quiet it had to come from inside that room, unless somebody was saying it somewhere further down the hall.”

“So that...” Amy says, “That thing is supposed to be Theodore Nagel? Is that what we're getting at here?” Everyone responds to her question at once: Audra shrugs and says “Maybe”, Jonah nods emphatically and says “Yes”, Dan laughs, saying “It can't be” and Simon scratches his head and says “It's hard to tell”. “Great, thanks,” Amy says when they finish. “That really cleared everything up.”

“Maybe they named him Teddy as a joke,” Dan says but he knows it's useless to even attempt to remain rational at this point. He could continue to explain as much of it away as a joke or a prank gone horribly awry but it's all just reached a point where he knows that the truth is severely more fucked up than that and resisting it is only making things much more difficult for himself. “Maybe it's one of those situations where people name their kids after themselves.”

“Or maybe,” Jonah says, “It's Theodore Nagel.”

“Alright. Say it is him. If that,” Dan points to the screen, “Is him, then who hell has been running the company this whole time?”

“That guy who called when we were in the car. The one who made you give up the video. He seemed to be running things pretty damn smoothly.”

“So let me get this straight:” Amy interjects, “You're saying that something happened to Theodore that turned him into... that and instead of just making up an illness and saying 'oh, So-And-So is going to run the company in his stead while he gets better' and just hope he either miraculously un-monster-ifies or, god forbid, dies, they lock him away in a room inside their company and put some mysterious man in charge and just go about their business, hoping that nobody notices.”

“Makes sense to me,” Jonah says once she finishes speaking.

“Dan...” Amy says, turns to look pointedly at him and Dan finds he's suddenly extraordinarily interested in the dirt that was still under his fingernails. “Don't tell me you agree with him.”

“I don't know,” Dan asserts, “It sounds fucking ridiculous when you say it but this whole thing has been absolutely ludicrous from the minute Amanda Stafford gave us Eric Nagel's name.”

“Who's Amanda Stafford?” Simon asks.

“None of your business,” Amy responds, returns her attention to Dan and Jonah, as if Simon and Audra were just mosquitoes buzzing around her ears and she had to swat them away. “I'm willing to admit a lot of really weird shit has been going on recently but—”

“The only way we're going to find the honey in this hive is if we jam our fists in through the front door and find it ourselves,” Jonah says. “We have to fucking go back and we have to do it today. Right now.”

“No.” Dan shakes his head, takes a step back as if he wanted to physically further himself from the idea. Sure, he had been all for it only a couple hours ago, but he wasn't prepared to storm the castle so suddenly, thought that maybe there was something else they could find, that they could continue to build up their box of evidence before they found themselves walking further down a one way street that eventually stopped at a dead end.

“Why not?” Jonah inquires. “We wait too long and they could shut it all down. We'd never find anything.”

“You guys want to go back into Nuvarin?” Audra interrupts, glances meaningfully at Simon before staring around at the other three journalists.

“We don't want to,” Amy corrects. “But they,” she points to Dan and Jonah, “Kind of see it as our only real option and, for some reason, I'm finding it difficult to let them run into the gaping jaws of that particular beast without me.” Audra laughs at Amy's comment but Dan knows that she's being one-hundred percent serious. The two of them shared a common trait in preferring to keep any kind of relationship that wasn't entirely professional at more than arm's length away at all times but the past few days have shifted the lid on things that were never supposed to be opened and Dan could see the frustration in her eyes. She should have ignored them, she shouldn't have so easily come running when a stranger called to tell her they were in trouble, she shouldn't have gotten involved because now here she was feeling things she didn't want to feel and willingly going into battle by the sides of these two idiots. Dan knows all of this because he was dealing with the exact same damn mess.

“If you're really going to do that,” Audra says, pushing past Dan and Amy to walk over to the filing cabinet and open one of the bottom drawers, taking something carefully out and holding it in a loosely curled fist as she comes back over to where they were still standing, “Then we might have something you could use.” She shows them what she held.

“So,” Simon says after giving them a few seconds to look at it, “The first question is: Which one of you looks the best in glasses?”

\- -

“They're gonna know,” Jonah says from where he sits behind the wheel, looking at himself in the rearview mirror while they wait at a stoplight and adjusting the chunky frames on his nose.

“They're not going to know,” Dan replies, sitting forward, having been relegated to the back because Amy claimed that being back there made her carsick and Dan was in no mood to argue. “Stop fidgeting with them.” They had been given a pair of glasses that came with a small camera embedded in the left side of the frame and, although Dan was sure they suited him the best, they had decided to give them to Jonah, based purely on the facts that he, out of the three them, seemed most likely to actually find something worthwhile and that his abnormally long legs meant that he could probably run faster anyway. The battery, they had been warned, only lasted two hours at most, and were told that if they planned on using it, it would have to be at the best moment possible because the last thing any of them needed was to waste it on hours of useless footage only to find what they were searching for and have no way of recording it. Both Amy and Dan had their phones, fully charged and ready, but the likelihood of them being able to get away with actually using them to capture anything significant was slim.

All they really had to rely on were those glasses and, worst of all, Jonah.

“No pressure, Jonah-Wan-Kenobi,” Dan had said while they walked back to where they had parked the car after leaving the _TTK_ office, “But you're our only hope.”

“Great,” Amy had said. “That's just fucking great.”

Now here they were, driving down a horribly familiar stretch of road, less than half an hour away from an unknown future and Dan feels his stomach twist into a tight knot, finding himself quietly hoping that they'd be lucky enough to simply be arrested upon their arrival and tossed into jail for trespassing. He knows his need for answers was stronger than his urge to tuck his tail between his legs and run in the opposite direction but he can't help but feel the overshadowing menace of peril, as if they were driving directly towards a 'Danger: Bridge Out' sign and choosing to ignore it because what might be on the other side was far more interesting than the very real possibility that they might not make the gap and wind up plummeting to their deaths into the icy, rocky water below.

“All I'm saying is,” Jonah was saying and Dan tunes back into the conversation going on in front of him because his current bout of introspection is only making him feel worse, “They've seen me without glasses. They've never not seen me without glasses.”

“Would you chill the fuck out? Please? If you keep panicking about it, I guarantee they'll notice. That's how this works. The less you draw attention to it, the less anybody will notice,” Amy says. She's holding on to her phone, keeps glancing down at it and turning on the screen only to shut it off again with a frustrated sigh.

“That's not always true,” Jonah says, pushes at the bridge with his thumb. “I had an uncle with a huge fucking mole on his face. Never spoke about it but it was the only thing anybody noticed.”

“Moles are gross,” Amy says. “Glasses aren't. That's just a fact of nature.” She turns the screen on again, stares at it, and then turns it off. “This is going to be the end of our careers,” she says suddenly. Dan wants to tell her that she's wrong but the truth was that he had same thought for quite awhile, lurking in the back of his head. Before they had left, they had called Kent and filled him in with absolutely everything that had happened (even the parts from earlier calls that Dan had danced around and kept to himself) and, after talking nearly non-stop at him for what felt like a month, there was a tense silence on the other end of the line and they could practically hear him frowning. He'd finally asked if they were joking and when they confirmed that no, they most definitely were not, he then asked if there was any point in him telling them to turn around and drop the story. No, Amy said, most likely not. When did they plan on coming back, then? Hopefully, Dan had told him, that evening. Maybe, Kent said before hanging up, they should just wait until tomorrow morning. Jonah hadn't understood but Dan and Amy had: From Kent's perspective, he was currently witnessing two of his best writers having a complete meltdown and pursuing a story that started with the possible secrets of a Governor and somehow spiraled into something that didn't directly involve the words 'conspiracy' and 'aliens', but might as well have. On top of that, Dan had been lying to him and Amy had abandoned a promising story of her own to join him and Jonah Fucking Ryan on this and that, at least to him, might have been even worse. Don't come back until tomorrow meant they were in serious trouble. It meant that their careers were basically over.

“Not mine,” Jonah says.

“Kent is never going to publish this, even if we get someone staring right at the camera and confessing everything,” Amy says, ignoring Jonah and turning to face Dan. “He may believe us, as unlikely as that is, but he probably knows, just like I do, that the people who read _The Leviathan_ would never in a million years take us seriously. The only ones who will are already crazy,” she mutters, looking forward again out towards the road.

“Have you two already fucking forgot that I have website? A website that is relatively popular, thank you very much.”

“Oh,” Dan says, “We haven't, trust us. I hate to break it to you though, buddy, but if people won't take this story seriously if it's published in _The Leviathan_ they really won't take it seriously when they read it on your website.”

“I have an incredible number of followers, Dan!”

“Most of which are reading just to laugh at you.”

“You're just jealous,” Jonah says, gripping the steering wheel tightly, knuckles whitening when Dan laughs.

“Please stop,” Amy says. “I can't listen to this. I shouldn't have even brought it up. That was my fault.” She sighs. “Can we just... not talk for awhile? Can we do that?” Reaching over, she turns on the radio, fiddling with the buttons until she finds a news station, the calm and monotonous tone of the host filling the emptiness of the car as they drove quietly down the road.

\- -

Dan isn't sure why, but there's a part of him that's almost disappointed to see that nothing truly major had changed since he had been there earlier that morning. He doesn't know what he expected, exactly. Heightened security, quite possibly, or maybe the entire building would have simply vanished, that they would return to find an empty space where something used to stand, nothing but an iron fence and an abandoned lot sitting in front of dirt and a broken foundation, as if it had been dismantled and carted away. What they saw instead, from where they sat in Jonah's car, was a relatively full parking lot and a man sitting in the small hut by the gate, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a newspaper.

“The one goddamn time we don't need someone to be there,” Dan says. “Maybe we can try to talk our way in. Maybe they're not looking for us anymore. As far as they knew, that video was it.”

“You seriously think there's anything any of us could possibly say that would make that asshole open the gates for us?” Amy asks and she's right. Even if they had gotten what they wanted, there was nothing that didn't say the immediate response to them attempting to come back wouldn't be met with either laughter or a call to the police.

“As far as I know,” Dan says, “There's no other way in unless somebody wants to try digging under the fence and trying to squeeze through a hole in the dirt. Or do you have a blowtorch in your purse that you've forgotten to tell me about?”

“Listen jack-ass,” Amy says, turning towards him, “Maybe if you hadn't—”

“I have an idea,” Jonah interrupts loudly, waits until the two of them turn to stare at him before continuing. “We just have to get inside the building, right?” He waits again, this time for an acknowledgement and Dan nods slowly. “So okay. I have an idea, but you probably won't like it.”

“I don't like anything right now,” Dan says. “Might as well just make things even worse.”

“How bad of an idea is this exactly?” Amy inquires and Jonah chuckles nervously, swallowing and clearing his throat.

The car slams loudly into the iron fence, hitting it just hard enough to put a serious dent into the nose of the car but not hard enough to have the airbags going off in Jonah and Amy's faces, Dan's seatbelt digging painfully into his neck as he presses against it, pushed forward by the impact.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” says a voice and Dan hears, past the ringing in his ears, the sound of the security guard opening the door to his little house, asking if everyone is alright and then speaking quickly into a walkie-talkie that had been attached to his belt, saying something about an accident at the front gate, that some crazy people just ran into it without hesitation and he wasn't sure how he was supposed to handle this situation. The response is garbled, but the man leans in to Jonah's window, telling them that more guards were coming and that they would most likely be escorted into the building, where they would then call the police and an ambulance to come sort everything out.

Seatbelts are quietly removed, and they watch as the guard pushes the button to open the barely damaged gate, two other figures exiting the front doors of Nuvarin, approaching quickly, neither of them moving with any sort of friendliness or concern but a sort of anger, arms stiff at their sides, legs striding with purpose. The gate guard goes to meet them halfway and, in that brief moment by themselves in the vehicle, Dan says:

“I can't fucking believe I agreed to that.”

“I can't fucking believe I wrecked my car on purpose. I'm going to be paying for this for the rest of my life,” Jonah says.

“How the hell are we're going to get out of here?” Amy asks and, just as Jonah reassures her that the car was still drivable, the engine began to smoke and the three of them all climb out, at the same time as the three guards were finally making their way over to where the trio were now standing, a few feet away from the damaged vehicle.

“Son of a bitch,” one of the other guards says, “I know these guys. We can't let them into the building.”

“Hey, yeah,” the other one says, while the guard who had been at the gate looks at them curiously and then turns to Dan, Amy, and Jonah and frowns, head to the side as he studies them and then goes back to his station to check at something inside.

“This isn't working,” Jonah whispers nervously.

“We have to run,” Dan says and Amy stares at him with wide, angry eyes, peering around Jonah who was standing in between her and Dan. She doesn't actually speak, but she doesn't have to. “I'm not happy about it either but—”

“Hey, Cal,” the guard from the gate says, taking a step out of his station so half of him was still inside, arm leaning against the doorframe and one of the other guards lifts his chin to let him know he's listening. “The boss wants to talk to you.” He tells the third guy to keep an eye on them and then walks over, climbs inside the small building and Dan exchanges purposeful looks with the other two, but none of them move, as if hoping one of the others would go first. Dan curses, clutches his fingers tightly around the strap on the bag slung over his shoulder and he lifts it over his head, twisting it into a loop and shortening the length so he barely gripped the bottom half, the heavy bag swinging in front of his stomach. He knew Jonah's laptop would be good for something.

“Shit,” Dan says. “Goddammit.” He takes a couple steps forward, hesitates and then swings the bag wildly, smacking the guard standing in front of him on the side of the head, watching as he topples sideways, dazed and unsettled by what just happened but he doesn't fall over which wasn't what Dan had expected and he panics, swings it again and hits him a second time, watches a couple teeth going flying through the air, clacking as they hit the ground. The man is on his knees, spitting up blood and trying to say something and, for some unknown but grossly fortuitous reason, the other two guards haven't noticed so Dan starts to run, listening to the feet of what he hoped were his friends behind him.

They're already part of the way across the parking lot when they hear yelling but they keep going, refusing to look back no matter how tempting it might be and Dan collides with the glass doors, smacking hard like a bird flying into a closed window and it stuns him but only for a few seconds and then Amy is opening the doors for him, Jonah grabbing the sleeve of his jacket and the three of them tumble into the lobby, where the same woman from Dan and Jonah's first visit is still sitting at her desk, looking utterly shocked.

“What the f—” She starts to say but doesn't get to finish as Amy marches up to her, slamming her hands down on the desk and commanding her to shut up and not fucking move before going back to where Dan and Jonah were standing and she glances towards outside where the guards were literally moments away from catching up to them.

“We have to go,” Amy says, “We have to fucking go.”

“I know, I know,” Dan says, runs hands frantically through his hair and then takes out his phone. “Jonah. Take my phone. Give me the glasses.”

“What? No. Why?”

“Don't fucking ask— Goddammit, look, you remember where you first found that thing you recorded. I don't. You have to find that room again. I'm going for the basement. Give me the glasses,” Dan says firmly and Jonah does a strange dance with his feet, curses and then yanks the glasses from his face, slapping them into Dan's waiting hand and accepting the phone into his own.

“See 'ya,” Jonah says and starts to run for the stairs, disappearing up to the next floor and they had never discussed exactly where Amy would go and what she would do so Dan grabs her and starts to pull her towards the elevators just as the guards burst inside the building. He looks to the pad but there's no downwards facing arrow button, nothing to indicate that there is anything at all underneath him and he can hear the guards getting closer, can practically feel their fingertips brushing the back of his jacket. He looks to the right, Amy to the left, and down in a nook just to the side is another door.

“Those better be the stairs,” Dan says and rushes towards them, Amy following and he peers through the small panel of glass in the metal to see a staircase leading downstairs. Hand on the doorknob, he turns it and nothing happens. “It's fucking locked,” he says, finally noticing a slot for a keycard to be inserted, like the door to a hotel room, just before they hear their pursuers yell at them to stop and turn around slowly, which they do, breathing heavily, hands up despite the fact that they hadn't asked them to do it.

“Put your bag on the floor,” one of them says and neither of them are holding guns, they don't even have a space on their belts for them, but they have stun guns that look a lot like the one that had zapped Dan earlier and Dan does as he says, carefully putting it down by his feet and then standing up straight again. “Where'd your friend go?”

“What friend?” Dan asks and the guard who had spoken to them snorts.

“Nevermind. We'll find him. You two are coming with us. We've got these babies if you try anything,” he says, patting the stun gun still stuck in his belt, “and a nice room you can wait in until we figure out what to do with you. I'm sure you remember this, Mister Egan,” he says, winking at Dan and Dan grimaces. He wasn't going to fight, he wasn't an action hero no matter how much he wishes he were sometimes. He was going to let these guards put them wherever they wanted to take them because he figured they might have a better chance at figuring things out if they just played along for awhile but that jab at his earlier visit, the wink that had been sent his way was the final straw and Dan clenches his jaw, walking forward and nudging his bag along with the toes of his shoe, waits until he's just close enough and then grabs at the strap, shifts the bag until he's gripping the laptop inside with two hands and slams it into the side of the guard's head, drops it on the floor to reach onto his belt and pull out the stun gun that they hadn't thought were necessary to use on the intruders and drives it into his neck, turning it on and sending a jolt through him, and the guard howls, falling to the floor.

“I'm sure you remember that, asshole,” Dan says, hears Amy call his name and turns just in time to see the second guard aiming for him with his own weapon and Dan dives to the floor, not sure of where else to go, jabbing the guard down there with him once more just for good measure, listens to the one Amy had warned him about start screaming, clutching at his eyes and Dan looks up to see Amy holding a can of mace that she continues to spray on the man's face, squirting it between his fingers until the canister is empty.

“Really?” Dan asks and Amy frowns, shrugging, brushing hair from her face.

“I'm not proud,” she says. Dan finds zip-tie handcuffs on the belt of the guard he had attacked and puts them on him before he's had a chance to fully recover and he considers doing the other man as well, but he's still crying and wailing, curled on his side in the fetal position, his hands locked over his face and it seems doubtful he'd be problem. On his knees, Dan crawls over to his bag and looks inside, checking to see the damage he had caused to Jonah's computer and it's enough of a distraction that he doesn't see the foot coming until it's collided with his face. The guard had squirmed close enough to strike at a weird enough angle that it didn't hurt as much as it could have but it was forceful enough that Dan lost his balance and the glasses went flying across the room.

He gathers himself, scrambles away, feels Amy's hands on his shoulders, trying to help him to his feet and everything is spinning, swaying like he's back on that boat, lost at sea and they both look around for where the glasses might have gone, jumping when the pale hand of the woman who had been behind the desk, who they had forgotten about, is reaching towards them from a few feet away, the glasses folded, resting in her palm.

“I know who you guys are,” she says and they stare at her, waiting for what was going to happen next, knowing that what they just pulled off was something they wouldn't be able to repeat, especially if she called the entire rest of the building's security downstairs to greet them. “I hate this place,” she says. “I've hated it since the day I started. Here,” she holds her hand out further and Dan takes the glasses back, unfolding the arms and pushing them back over his ears. “I can't open the door to the stairs for you but I can tell you where the boss' office is, if that'll help. And I'll do my best to keep security away from your friend.”

“Thanks,” Dan says breathlessly.

“Sure. If I'm going to be fired, might as well do it for a good cause. He's on the top floor. Once you're off the elevator... well, it's the only room up there. Good luck,” she says, giving them a slight nod and then goes back to her desk, picks up the phone and dials, speaking to someone on the other end in a quiet voice.

“Come on,” Amy says and the two of them walk towards the elevators again and she jabs her finger on the button, the two of them standing and waiting impatiently for one to show up. Dan can feel Amy staring at him and he looks sideways at her.

“What?”

“What do you mean 'what'? We just kicked those guard's asses.”

“I know,” Dan says, trying not to smile and failing miserably. “I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to do that again for the rest of my life. Damn,” he says suddenly, “I feel like I'm going to fucking puke.”

“You'll be fine,” Amy says flippantly, which was her way of asking him if he was going to be alright.

“I am fine,” Dan responds, even though he wasn't entirely sure that he was, his head starting to throb again, the left side of his face sore. Amy looks like she wants to say something else but then there's a cheerful ding and the elevator doors to the far right slide open, waiting for them to step inside.

\- -

“Maybe we shouldn't have trusted her,” Amy says, hands in the pockets of her coat and Dan glances at her but then returns his attention to the numbers as they glow, one at a time. “She could have called somebody. They might be waiting for us as soon as we step out of this elevator.”

“Maybe,” Dan agrees, because that possibility didn't exactly escape him, but they've made it this far. Worst thing that could happen is they'd get put right back into the same room they were threatened with being put into before and they'd just have to wait it out. At least they still had Jonah, although wherever the hell that guy had wound up was completely unknown to either of them. “God,” he says, “I hope Jonah—” But he stops himself, rolls his shoulders and keeps his gaze fixed upwards, even when he hears Amy respond.

“You 'hope Jonah' what?”

“That he doesn't have an aneurysm when he finds out that his computer is probably broken.”

“Right,” Amy says, matching his gaze, tilting her chin so she, too, could watch the numbers. The elevator finally lurches to a stop, hesitates as if it were somehow nervous about where it had ended up and then the doors opened, revealing a large room ahead, sparse and eerie. They walk out together, neither one of them taking the lead and whatever light the elevator had been providing is gone once the doors close again, leaving them standing in the dimly lit space, each movement they make bouncing off the bare walls, their footsteps and breath sounding much louder than they really were.

There's barely any furniture other than a few chairs pushed up against a wall as if they were weeds that had grown there and nobody has bothered trying to pull them up and a desk at the opposite end of the room that was directly in front of a large window, the opaque curves of the Nuvarin sign on the other side blocking any outside light from getting in. The carpet was the color of mud, the walls dry clay and Dan furrows his brow.

“This is fucking depressing.”

“It's like a decoy office. A few bland couches, a coffee table, some ugly sculptures and a plastic plant and you've got yourself a furniture showroom display,” Amy says. “Guess that desk is pretty much it, huh.” She walks quickly over to towards it and Dan follows, finally turning on the camera in his glasses, fumbling blindly until he found the small button and then adjusting them on his face before joining Amy who already had her own phone out and was recording the entire space around her, arms sweeping in an arc before she sits down in the chair, propping her phone against a canister of pens and pencils, camera facing her as she searches through the drawers. What they find are stacks of paper, some with paragraphs of endless sentences, others with seemingly meaningless numbers and Amy motions for Dan's bag, starts stuffing everything she can fit into it, folding pages to squeeze into corners.

“What the hell is this?”

“No idea. But we're taking everything we can.” Dan begins to help her and, as he shoves papers in there, his fingers brush against something solid and he brings out the Nuvarin pen from a couple days ago, puts it in his pocket just to make some extra room. When they finish, his bag is ten times the size it had been when they had arrived and he drops it with a loud thud on top of the desk.

“None of this,” Dan says, “Helps us find a way into the basement.” He starts to feel around in spots, exploring places on the desk that he couldn't see, lifting the cup of writing utensils to peer underneath it and he pauses when he sees Amy giving him a strange look from where she sat. “There might be a button or something.” She laughs, shaking her head. “Oh, shut up. Like that would be the weirdest thing that happened lately.” There isn't anything there, though, so he stands up from his crouch and walks over to the wall to his left, feeling around and pressing his ear against it and he hears Amy make a noise of disapproval.

“Dan, you're embarrassing yourself.”

“You're embarrassing me,” says a familiar voice and they both jump, turning to see a figure walking towards them from the elevator, whose doors were only just closing. They hadn't heard... how could they have not heard him? “Who do you think I am? A Bond villain? You really think I have some secret passageway all the way up here? Do you know how much that would cost to make?” He stops just a few feet away from where Dan was still leaning against the wall and Dan slowly walks backwards until he's standing by the desk. Dan knows that face, he knows who this person is and he hates himself for taking this long to figure it out, can suddenly and vividly hear him explaining tediously about something having to do with blood clots as he stared blankly at a camera.

“Eric...?” Dan says haltingly, mouth dry.

“Jesus,” Amy says, standing up, “I thought you were supposed to be dead.”

“Presumed dead,” Eric says. “Technically I was just missing. Hate to disappoint you either way. But here I am and here you two are. Find anything interesting yet?” He asks, pointing to his desk and then noticing Dan's bag. “I guess so. You obviously haven't read it yet because, if you had, you wouldn't just be standing there staring at me with your mouths open. I'm sure you have a lot of questions but I'm afraid I don't have any answers. So here's how thing's are going to go: we're all going to stay right here until I get confirmation that Mister Ryan has been located—” Upon hearing this, Dan and Amy share the briefest of glances as if to ask each other how it was possible that nobody has apparently been able to find a man that was almost seven feet tall and running around a building that, for all intents and purposes, wasn't very large. “—And then we'll figure out what to do with you from there. Anyone know you came back here today?”

“No,” Dan lies. “Why?”

“Because that makes things easier.” He closes the gap between them, walks behind his desk and shoos Amy away from his chair so he could sit down, begins straightening everything and then finally spies Amy's phone, lifts it and inspects the screen. “Hmm,” he grunts, turning the camera off and dropping it into a pocket.

“That's it?” Dan asks. “We're just going to sit here in silence?”

“What did you expect? Me rambling on, revealing everything in one long monologue?” Eric laughs. “You've watched too many movies.”

“Can I just ask you one thing? Just one,” Dan says and Eric stares up at him, eyes narrowed as he considers it, and eventually he smiles, leans back and sweeps his arm out in a 'go right ahead' gesture. “Did you really have terminal cancer?” Eric falters, as if that wasn't the question he had been expecting and he smiles slowly in a way that would have been attractive if anybody but him was doing it.

“Yes. I'd ask how you knew about that but I feel like would be a waste of time. I did and, truthfully, I still do, but that isn't what you asked so I guess that will just remain a mystery.” He checks his watch—a fancy timepiece that most likely cost more than Dan paid for his apartment—as if there was somewhere else he needed to be or was expecting something very specific to happen at any moment.

“There's really no secret elevator or hidden staircase up here?” Amy asks and Eric spins in his chair to stare her down.

“Sorry. Guess I'm not quite as stereotypically evil as you thought.”

“It can't be that easy,” Dan says, looking at Amy, who shrugs at him in response. Eric frowns, looking back and forth between them. “I guess so.” He touches the glasses he's wearing, does his best to make it seem as if he's simply adjusting him. Whatever they have to do next, Dan's not entirely sure he wants it to be on camera. His heart is racing, his anxiety has picked a really shitty moment to kick in, and he wonders why it hadn't shown it's ugly face when they had been fighting off those guards. He swallows, ignores it the way he's gotten used to doing for years. “I'd say I'm sorry for this,” Dan says, “But I'm really, really not.” He reaches down into his pocket and grasps the pen he had slipped in there, clicks it open and throws himself at Eric, the chair tipping on it's wheels, knocking them both to the floor and, without pause, jams the pen directly into one of Eric's eyes.

Eric's hands immediately go to his face, fingers cupping around the pen that wobbled as his wounded eye tried to move, to look around on instinct and Dan rolls off of him, slides away, using his heels to kick himself backwards as Eric flails for a few moments as if his entire body was confused and entirely unsure of how to properly deal with what just happened to it. Taking a few deep breaths as if he was preparing to dive back down underwater, Dan crawls back over to Eric and begins frantically searching through his pockets, eventually finding a keycard tucked away in the inside of his jacket and he lifts his hand, feels Amy take it from him and, by that point, Eric had calmed down enough that he was simply laying on his back, hands still over his eye, chest heaving.

“Holy shit, Dan,” Amy says, starts to pull on him and Dan rises to his feet, the two of them running back towards the elevator, not wanting to wait around to see what might happen next. They jump in, pushing the button for the lobby and, just as the doors closed, they can hear Eric begin to howl with maniacal laughter.

\- -

“Amy...” Dan starts to say once they're alone but she refuses to look at him, shakes her head, shifts uneasily on her feet.

“Just don't talk to me. Just... don't.” She sighs, tucks her hair behind an ear and Dan stares at his feet because he understands. He wouldn't go so far as to say that he knew he had it in him--had figured that out since he easily made the decision to send a man flying through a windshield in a vehicle he crashed on purpose--but he wasn't exactly thrilled to be the type of person who could stab a man who wasn't doing anything to harm them at that exact moment through the eye, simply to try and find a key that he may not have even had with him. Amy breaks her own imposed silence a few seconds later. “You left your bag up there.”

“Son of a—” Dan puts his face in his hands, sighing heavily.

\- -

Back in the lobby, they're surprised to see that both of the guards they had left behind are still on the ground, the one who had been maced now with his own hands bound and the woman still seated behind her desk. She acknowledges them but says nothing and Dan and Amy begin to head back towards the door they had discovered earlier when they hear someone running down the stairs above them, seeming to take them two at a time in great leaps and they look up, surprised to see Jonah appearing and he seems equally shocked to see them as well. He's out of breath, clothes messed, skin flushed pink and the three of them stare at each other wordlessly for a moment.

“Where have you been?” They ask one another simultaneously and then hesitate once more.

“Eric's still alive,” Dan tells Jonah, who blinks slowly at them, as if it was taking him a little bit longer than usual to process the information he had just received. He considers telling Jonah what he had done, to unburden it just a bit more so it rested on not just his and Amy's shoulders but Jonah's as well but he clamps his mouth shut and keeps it to himself.

“No shit,” Jonah says eventually, looks at Amy who nods once, raises her eyebrows. “Some employee on the other side of the door let me into the hallway but they left before I could ask them why. Theodore's still in his room. I couldn't get in but I think he tried to talk to me in between all the fucking screeching. Not that I could understand him and I couldn't stick around for very long. I've got, like, five guys running after me. I think I lost them but who knows.” He glances restlessly towards the stairs, bounces from one foot to the other. Amy says nothing, takes the keycard from her pocket, Dan and Jonah following her to the door, and Dan holds his breath, watching as she slips it into the slot, breathing a sigh of relief as they hear a faint buzz and a click, the door sliding open easily when she turns the handle.

“Here we go,” she says and then walks through, the other two close behind and they listen as the door shuts with a quiet thud, hands gripping the railing as they descend.

\- -

After walking for what felt like much longer than it probably was, surrounded by nothing by pale walls and the echoing noises of their feet as they move, they wind up on what appears to be the last level, staring at another door, this time with no glass and no handle, only another keycard lock, square and metallic, waiting for them.

“Let's hope this is a one-size-fits-all sort of deal,” Amy says, jamming the card into the slot, the door swinging inwards, opening towards a dark hallway that seemed to go on forever. Dan finally remembers to turn his camera back on, but it won't do them any good if there wasn't anything to film other than the pitch blackness stretching out endlessly in front of them. Jonah pulls out his phone, uses the bright screen as a flashlight, holding his arms out in front of him as he takes a few steps forward, feeling the ground carefully like he thought they might be walking into a gaping hole and then takes a few more steps, practically vanishing before their eyes as if he were being swallowed and Dan reaches out, grasps the back of his jacket, not to stop him but to make sure he didn't lose him. Moving forward, following Jonah, he feels Amy grab his clothes, fingers tight in the fabric.

There's nothing around them and Dan begins to feel slightly claustrophobic, despite the seemingly immense space, and Jonah uses his light to illuminate the floor, hesitating every few seconds to peer around them, giving the walls a faint glow, pointing to the ceiling to see bulbs that weren't on but Dan knew that attempting to find a light switch would most likely prove to be futile at this point. Onward and onward until Jonah lets out an “oof!” and collides with something solid and Dan walks into him, Amy into Dan and Dan shifts to stand next to Jonah, making sure to keep his grip on him.

“What is it?” He asks with a whisper and Jonah illuminates the area in front of him.

“Looks like another door,” he says. “There's a... yeah. There's another lock. Amy—”

“Hold on,” she says, fumbling around them, hands everywhere as she pushes past them out of the way and she grabs Jonah's wrist, directs the light towards what she was doing and hunches over, taking a few tries to get it into the hole. The door opens easily once more, welcoming them to a brightly lit room and they all duck their heads, shielding their eyes until they had been given a moment to adjust before finally pulling their arms down and peering inside.

The floor is nothing but dirt and rocks, the walls simply made of cinderblocks slapped together with mortar. Construction equipment that looked to be almost twenty years old sat abandoned, industrial sized lights blazing white and hot as if this entire space was frozen in time while the rest of the world aged around it, stuck down here like the workers had refused to go near this place and just built the rest of Nuvarin around it the best that they could. A wet, rotten stench like they were standing in a swamp envelops them, smacks them in the face and Dan tries breathing through his mouth but it doesn't help, can taste it in the back of his throat.

All of this, though, becomes nothing worth mentioning when they see what was in the middle of the room. Protruding from the ground as if it had risen from the soil like a tree was an obelisk, just over eight feet tall and shining black like an obsidian with all the ridges and points of a crystal.

They walk further into the room, moving as if they were one person, mesmerized by it and they find themselves only a few inches away. There are pieces knocked out from it as if it had been chiseled at and Dan feels his skin begin to tingle, watches as Jonah reaches out to touch it and he wants to make him stop but his body won't listen, moves as if it's on a delay.

“Holy shit,” Jonah says. “What the fuck.” He pulls his hand away quickly, shakes it and then wipes it off on his pants. “That's not— What the fuck,” he repeats, flexes his finger, stares down at his hand as if he's expecting it to start growing something that didn't belong there. Both Dan and Amy touch it at the same time, palms flat against the surprisingly warm surface and, at first, Dan can't figure out what bothered Jonah so much but then he feels it, just faintly: the thud, thud, thud of a beating heart. Hands yank away like they've been burned, Dan stumbling backwards and Amy's face is entirely drained of color.

“It's unsettling, isn't it?” They spin around, turning to see Eric standing behind them, a piece of cloth wrapped around his head, covering his eye, a few drops of blood ruining what was otherwise a still relatively pristine suit. “The first time Teddy brought me down here, I threw up. Of course, that could have just been the cancer.” He walks towards them and they move to keep the distance between them, but the obelisk is in their way and none of them want to risk touching it again. “I was really hoping,” Eric says, pausing, hands behind his back as he looks up at the pillar, “That you wouldn't have found this. Now I guess it won't matter if I tell you everything, since none of you are going to leave. I guess I really am more cliché than I thought.” He says it sadly as if he regrets it and Dan feels his stomach drop. “I'll try to keep it brief, then. This... thing was discovered on the property during construction... No, you don't want to hear about all of that, do you? Let's just skip ahead to the good part.

"Teddy gets the company in 2004. I'm sure you knew that. Turns out, that our father had been keeping this hidden away down here the entire time. Teddy manages to keep it to himself but starts poking and prodding at it. Calls in his old college buddy, Ronald to help. Now,” he says, moving his hands to shove them in his pockets, speaking to them like he's sitting on the couch at a talk show, “There's a lot here I can't tell you because I didn't come home until 2011. Because of my diagnosis, you see. I told Teddy and he wouldn't stop haranguing me, trying to get me to come back, and I figured, I might as well if it would shut him up. I didn't understand why he cared so much. I mean, sure we're brothers but we hated each other. Always have.

"But then he eventually showed me this. Told me that they had been experimenting with it here, had managed to crush a piece of it into a powder and shove it into a capsule, like a pill. What was it supposed to do, I asked. Well, Teddy confesses, he didn't know. None of them really knew for sure. But he had figured, and here's the kicker,” Eric says, laughing, “He had figured he could get me to take it because I was dying either way, what did it matter if they just possibly hurried along the process? Can you imagine how I felt?” The mirth on his face dies down, expression settling into one of resentment instead. “That he thought he could just— I mean, I took it. Of course I did. And he knew that I would, which is why he never really asked. He just suggested it.” He pauses, sighs, goes to rub a hand absent-mindedly at his bandaged eye and then stops himself. “Two years go by. I'm still alive. I had four months left when I first flew back here but I feel great. Healthier than I did before I got sick. I'd be running marathons, coming in first every time if Teddy didn't insist on keeping me under his watch twenty-four/seven. Nobody was supposed to see me. You,” Eric says, pointing at Amy. “I remember talking to you, though. Hard to forget. Should have asked for your number when I had the chance.” Amy grimaces and Eric grins.

“So you got better,” Dan finally says.

“Yes and no. Like I said: the cancer is still in there,” he says, points to his body. “But it's gone dormant. Not growing, not shrinking, not screwing around with my organs. I have the scans to show it. Too bad you won't see them. It's fascinating.”

“So what happened with Theodore?” Dan asks and Eric laughs again.

“Ego. His massive ego is what happened with him. He gets jealous, wants to be like I am, but assumes he'll be better since he isn't sick. Takes two pills, swallows them down with a glass of champagne. Three months later, after a lot of agony, and he becomes what you saw before you. A shrieking monster. We had to lock him away because I couldn't kill him. Despite all the misery we've caused each other since we were children, I couldn't go through with it. I took over the company, kept everything in order. And that,” he says, brushing his hands together, “Is the short version of things. Things would have stayed smooth like that if I hadn't forgotten to fix the lock on the hallway door, the door that you, Mister Ryan, just happened to stumble upon. Side effect of the obelisk, I'm afraid. Slight memory loss on occasion.”

“What about Ronald?” Amy asks. “What happened to him?”

“I don't know,” Eric says, puts his hands up when Amy grunts. “Honest. I get a call from the woman at the front desk, says that Ronald's wife is asking about him, that he never came home the night before. I made some calls, searched the building but he was gone. There was nothing I could do. He was way more involved in all of this than I ever was. For all I know, he panicked and ran. But anyway,” Eric says, coughing into a closed fist. “I really don't have the time to chat any longer. I have to take one of those pills every month and I'm due for my dose. Was supposed to take it awhile ago but you three have been making that difficult. Now,” he reaches underneath his jacket and takes out a handgun that he must have picked up on the way downstairs, “Do you want to just go missing or would you rather wind up in a horrible accident? I'm open to either. Having you go missing is easier for me but I don't mind putting in the extra effort for you three.”

Dan can feel both Amy and Jonah looking to him as if they expect him to have an idea, some sort of way to get them out of this because they had their answers, all they needed was to get to the door, to get Eric out of the way so they could run but he's paralyzed where he stands, his mind completely blank. There was nothing to be done that didn't involve, in his head, at least one of them being left behind, wounded or dead on the dirt floor, never to be heard from again. Instead, he leans against the obelisk, shoulders sagging, his legs weak, and feels the warmth and dull thudding against his back. He had tried. He had put his neck on the line for a story and had hoped that, in the end, he'd be able to lift his head and avoid being stomped on by the big black boot of failure but here he was, with the only two people he trusted by his side, ready to meet the end and never able to get the truth out to whomever they could get to listen. How would things have turned out if he had ignored the name Caitlin had given him, an obvious ploy to divert his attention away from her and her child, and just pursued the story about Lombardi? He would be sitting in a restaurant or in a government office building, having a conversation with someone who knew someone who gave the paternity test to Lombardi or that had seen Caitlin and the Governor talking on a street corner, possibly, maybe. He and Amy would talk about their respective stories without revealing too much to one another and then would go home late in the evening and drunkenly read Jonah's website, catching up with what he had missed and laugh at him, the television tuned to the news in the background as an ambient noise to keep him company.

He'd go to bed, wake up the next morning and do the same thing all over again.

“No thoughts?” Eric asks, shrugging, lifting the gun towards them, clutched tightly in two hands. “Fair enough. Missing it is. I apologize if I miss. Somebody stuck a pen in one of my eyes.” Dan wonders if he should close his eyes or leave them open, feels Amy grasp hands around one of his arms, Jonah doing the same on his other side and he takes a deep breath through his nose.

The door bursts open without warning and Eric whips around to face a group of guards standing in the doorway.

“What the hell do you want?” Eric shouts, lowering his arms. “I'm busy.” The guard in the front looks momentarily appalled, as if this was the first time he had seen the obelisk, as if he knew there was a room down here but had never been permitted to see inside. He quickly regains some of his composure and addresses Eric, though his eyes never quite look away from the obelisk in front of him.

“Sir, we have to leave. Now.”

“What? Why? I'm right in the middle—”

“Sir,” the guard interrupts hurriedly, “The building is on fire.”

“So put it out,” Eric says after taking a moment to absorb the information.

“It's not a trashcan fire, Sir,” the guard says urgently, voice rising with concern. “The first two floors are entirely engulfed. Look, I used to work construction and it seems that whoever built this place completely fudged it. The materials used... if we don't evacuate everyone right now, we're all going to burn to death in a matter of minutes.”

“Teddy...” Eric says, trailing off and the guard shakes his head.

“He was a sitting duck in that room, same as we will be if we don't get the fuck out of here.” The guard looks apologetic, face reddening at the language he just used, at the way he spoke to his superior, especially a superior that was currently holding a gun. “I'm sorry,” he says, “But if you won't come with us, we'll have to leave you behind.” He looks to Dan, Amy, and Jonah as he says it, as if he's telling this to them as well, as if they actually had a choice and Dan sees Jonah tense, hears him say 'Fuck it' and he rushes forward, jabs a sharp elbow into Eric's bad eye, sending him howling to his knees as blood blossoms on the cloth wrapped around his head and Dan and Amy take that as their cue to run after Jonah, the three of them making a beeline for the door and the group of guards, who don't move to let them pass.

Dan is ready to beg, to fight them if necessary even if it meant that he would lose, but the guard who had been talking looks to them, to Eric on the ground and then at the obelisk, still standing tall and unharmed, protruding from the dirt and he steps aside, the others following suit, clearing a path and then turning back towards the room, spilling inside to try and carry their boss out but Dan doesn't look behind to see if they had succeeded and runs without stopping, the sound of Amy and Jonah a comforting noise as they head for the stairs.

\- -

There's smoke, thick and dark, already billowing into the lobby once they emerge from the door, the alarm wailing, a steady stream of employees that managed to outrun the fire pouring down the stairs, a large group already forming outside in the parking lot. Dan thinks briefly of his bag, left in Eric's office, stuffed to the brim with documents that could have offered a more startlingly in-depth explanation but there was no going back and he knew it was most likely burnt to a crisp, as they soon would be if they didn't leave.

Blending in with the crowd, they tumble outside, coughing, acting as if they had been with everyone else, despite the fact that nobody was in the right mind to even bother questioning them. They fall back, stand with the others, staring up at a building in flames, fire dancing and consuming everything in it's way, devouring anything that could even attempt to stop it from satiating it's hunger.

“You didn't...” Dan starts to ask Jonah, who looks at him utterly baffled and almost offended.

“I didn't do that!” Jonah says. “I don't set fires. Not fucking real ones, anyway.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dan hears Amy mutter. He looks to the front doors, watches as more and more people come out, stands on his toes, doesn't notice he's waiting to see Eric emerge with his loyal guards until he realizes that he hasn't seen them yet. The crowd outside is beginning to thicken, the last few stragglers limping out, hacking up their lungs after inhaling smoke and a few guards that had made it out earlier are telling them all to get back, to move away, that help was coming. There's still no sign of Eric and Dan isn't happy, may have hated him but he didn't go in there wanting him to die, hadn't wanted anybody to die just so they could get their story. People are crying and talking all around them, trying to make sense of what had just happened, about how they may have lost friends and co-workers, about years of hard work literally up in flames and the doors suddenly erupt open once more but whomever it was who came outside was shrouded in black smoke.

There's somebody calling their names, loud and insistent and they look around, searching the mob to see the woman from the front desk hopping, waving her arms and Dan gives one last look over his shoulder, sees Eric on the ground, panting, completely alone and then begins to push through the people until they find her waiting for them, a glittery keychain with a set of car keys dangling from her fingers.

“Oh my God,” she says, brushes hair back off her forehead. “Oh my God. You guys made it out. I can't believe— Come on. I'm parked over this way,” she says, gestures for them to follow her, which they do without pause, and she leads them to a small vehicle sitting under a low hanging branch. “It's not very big but I can get you out of here.” They climb in, Amy sitting in the front with the woman, Dan and Jonah squeezing into the back and, in a matter of minutes, the four of them are sailing through the open gates and on to the road, disappearing towards the highway.

\- -

They're driving for almost ten minutes in silence, the woman because she was concentrating on the road in front of her, both hands holding the wheel stiffly, the other three because you don't just walk away from an experience like that and start chatting about what you were going to have lunch. Dan looks out his window, staring over the line of trees that all blurred together as they moved, smoke visible as it twisted and bloomed, dissolving into the pale grey sky. He finally takes off the glasses, turning the camera onto himself before shutting it off and he tucks them somewhere safe, rubbing his hands over his eyes, listens to Jonah breathing beside him, to the soft noises of Amy drumming her fingers on the handle of her door, keeping her fingers occupied.

“I hope you guys got what you were looking for,” the woman says finally.

“Me too,” Dan replies, pats the pocket he had put the glasses in, glances to Jonah who shows him that he did, in fact, still have his phone and the look on his face assures Dan that there was definitely something worth seeing on it.

“Do you know what happened? With the fire, I mean.”

“Heard people throwing the words 'lab accident' around. But who knows. Maybe God thought you guys could use a little Deus Ex Machina.” She looks to the three of them, with faces ranging from impressed to baffled and she frowns, sits up straighter in her seat. “Just because I worked the front desk at a pharmaceutical company doesn't mean I don't know things. Half the people like me are Literature Majors anyway,” she grumbles.

“Well,” Amy says, “Thanks for getting us out of there...” She prompts her for a name and the woman looks sideways at her and then in the rearview mirror at the two seated in the back.

“Caitlin Stafford.”

“Wait. Wait,” Dan says, holding up a hand. “Caitlin Stafford?”

“Yeah. My sister is—”

“Amanda Stafford,” Jonah finishes for her and Caitlin glances at him but doesn't look too shocked that they already seem to know.

“After what that company did to her... Lombardi was involved but all he did was get her pregnant. Theodore Nagel got her fired. Made her sign something so she'd never talk about it, promised that was it but they ruined her life. Basically blacklisted her. She couldn't get a job anywhere else except as a waitress. I let her borrow my first name and the last name is our grandmother's maiden name, to start over, I guess, without having to move away. I tried to get her to talk about what she saw, about why they made her leave but she wouldn't tell me. With you guys showing up... she must have gotten fed up, said something to you.”

“Why were you working there exactly?” Dan asks.

“I was biding my time. Figured I'd pick the right moment to fuck with them.” She looks around at the suspicious faces and shakes her head. “I didn't start the fire, I swear. I would never. I was just going to back up their toilets or something. But then you guys came bursting through the doors... You did me a favor. So I did you one in return. Look,” she says after a moment, “I don't want my name or my sister's name in any of this, alright? She was an anonymous source and I was a Good Samaritan. We'll leave it at that.” Jonah looks as if he wants to protest, to try and convince her that her name should be up in lights, that she'll be seen as a national hero or God know's what other pseudo-encouraging garbage would come spilling out of his mouth but Dan interrupts him, putting a hand over his face just to get his point across.

“That's fine with me,” he says, eyes flickering to Amy who merely shrugs tiredly.

“Great,” the real Caitlin says. “I figure you want to go back to the city. Anywhere specific I can take you?” The three of them share looks, none of them entirely sure how to answer her, until Dan clears his throat and says:

“Yeah, actually, I know where you can take us.”

\- -

Audra opens the door to the _TTK_ office as if she had been standing in front of it since they had left, simply waiting for them to return and she ushers them into the room with wild eyes, pushing and pulling at them, closing the door behind them and locking it, like she was expecting an army to be close behind them. She and Simon seem to still be the only ones there and Simon looks up from his desk, the massive tome he had been going through the night before being taken off his lap and dropped gently down, legs swinging onto the floor.

“Holy fuck,” Audra says. “Sit. All of you sit. I'll make coffee.” She rushes over to their ancient machine, starts dumping coffee grounds into the receptacle and Simon meanders over to them, sitting on the edge of the desk that the three had slumped down behind in heavy wooden chairs. “I can't believe it,” Audra says, standing over the machine, watching it, bouncing on her toes. “It's all over the news.”

“What is?” Jonah asks, and Simon walks back to his desk, grabbing his computer screen and turning it so it faces outwards into the room. There, in big block letters on the first page of a news site, it reads: **Breaking News: Massive Fire at Nuvarin.** Underneath there was already a crisp photo, the building engulfed in yellows, oranges, and blacks, the crowd of employees still gathered, watching as the firefighters struggle to tame the blaze. The photo switches to another angle and then to a picture of Eric Nagel being carried away on a stretcher, skin dirty and grey, oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, the side of his face with his ruined eye turned away from whatever camera had been attempting to catch him.

“We thought maybe you guys had— But then I thought you had set—” She turns to stare at each of them individually as the coffee machine begins to gurgle and spit. “You didn't...?”

“No,” Dan says at the same time Amy says, “Absolutely not!” and Jonah says, “Why does everyone think I did it.”

“Good,” Simon says, spinning the screen back around. He goes to join them again and, by then, the coffee was done and Audra pours five mugs worth, not putting milk or sugar in any of them before curling her fingers around each handle and carrying them all over without spilling a single drop. She hands them out and Dan holds onto it tightly but the warmth that was seeping into his palms reminds him too much of the obelisk so he turns it, grasps the handle instead and looks to see Amy and Jonah doing the same. “Did you come straight here?”

“Yeah,” Dan admits.

“Why?” Simon asks and Dan opens his mouth but pauses, closing it and blinking. He wasn't sure. It would make more sense for them to go back to the _Leviathan_ , but after the conversation they had with Kent over the phone before they left, he wasn't sure they'd be welcome there for much longer, especially if they showed up in their current state, waving around a pair of glasses with a camera, talking about an obelisk with a heart-beat and a mad doctor who was eating pieces of it to keep his cancer at bay, about the CEO of a pharmaceutical company who had turned into a monster and who may or may not be dead (possibly dead, technically missing) and a mysterious stranger with a good heart who drove them home from a building that had been set on fire under equally mysterious circumstances. It made for one hell of a story, but not one that Kent seemed willing to publish, even with the proof most likely right in front of him. Maybe he was involved or, maybe, he was just a goddamn idiot. Dan had no way of knowing for sure. What he did know, though, was that Simon and his staff (or, as he should be say, Audra) had believed every word and, at this point in his life, that seemed to suddenly count for a whole heck of a lot. Dan would never admit it to their faces, though so, instead, he says:

“I don't know.” He hesitates, takes a sip of the bitter coffee and exhales slowly. “You guys aren't hiring, are you?”

“I can't tell if you're kidding,” Simon says and Dan laughs, both at his comment and at the horrified faces of Jonah and Amy.

“Me neither,” he says and takes another drink from his mug.

\- -

Their ride was long gone by now and none of them had cars nearby, Jonah's left behind at Nuvarin, Dan's still at the impound in another town and Amy's parked at the _Leviathan_ lot so they start walking, the subway only a few blocks away.

“What the hell are we going to do now?” Amy asks after a couple of minutes.

“We're gonna write the damn story,” Jonah says.

“Oh,” Amy says, “I know. I mean after that. You know, when Eric Nagel tells the police that Dan stabbed him in the eye. Hell, for all we know he could frame us for the fire. He seems like the revenge type, doesn't he?”

“I hear California is nice this time of year,” Dan says, pulling his jacket closer around himself to battle against the sudden chill in the air.

“I'm not going to California with you knuckleheads,” Amy scoffs.

“Hey,” Jonah says, “I'm a great fucking roommate.”

“And I'm definitely not living with you! Besides, I highly doubt that,” Amy says.

“Fine,” Dan says as they stand on the corner of a crosswalk amongst a group of other people, waiting for the light to change. “How about somewhere closer to home. What about D.C.?”

“Hm,” Amy responds once they're on the other side of the street. “I've always wanted to get into politics.”

“Jonah Ryan in the White House,” Jonah says. “I like the sound of that.” He frowns when the other two laugh. “It could happen.”

“Sure, Jonah. Why not,” Dan says, patting him on the back. “Dream big, buddy.” They reach the entrance to the subway and, just as they begin to descend the stairs, arguing amongst themselves, the sky opens up, rain pouring, the sound of thunder rumbling somewhere off in the distance.

 

 

& & &

_One Week Later_

“I'm standing here,” the young news reporter says, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail as she speaks directly to a camera pointed at her face, “At the site of the Nuvarin fire, where clean up is finally under way. As you can see behind me, there are machines being used to clear up the stone and debris, while men and women are going through the rest of the damage to clear away the broken equipment and whatever is salvageable but, let me say, I'm not sure how much they'll find. There have been reports coming in over the past week and we've spoken to an architect who has told us that the material that had been used to build Nuvarin was subpar and extremely flammable and was quoted saying that he was 'surprised it had lasted this long'. CEO Theodore Nagel has yet to be found and his brother Eric who—”

There's a commotion from behind her and she turns, motions for the camera to zoom in and it focuses on a couple workers in hardhats and neon yellow vests as they pull back a large piece of collapsed ceiling to reveal a strange, obsidian-colored and crystal-shaped obelisk that was covered in dust but, otherwise, completely unscathed.

“What in the world...” The reporter says and she takes a few careful steps forward, the camera following her. She stops, gestures to the camera to look back at her and then points to the discovery. “A strange, pillar-like object has just been uncovered in the middle of the debris. The workers seem to be examining it right now. Let's see if we can get a closer look.” As she walks, one of the workers leans over to press a hand against it, but quickly pulls back, staggering backwards, a look of horror on his face.

“...heartbeat!” The camera manages to pick up, sending out that final word to the rest of the world, just before the reporter lets out a terrifying scream and the picture cuts to static.


	2. Author's Note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now for some rambling! YOU’RE WELCOME.

\- “Disclosure is, in the context of those who believe in UFO conspiracy theories, the revelation of suppressed evidence of extraterrestrial life by the United States government or other world governments.” Obviously, Nuvarin is not a government agency of any kind but I liked that it was linked with aliens and conspiracies as well as having a relatable, normal definition re: what Dan and Jonah (and Amy) are doing.

\- I LIKE WRITING STORIES THAT INVOLVE EXTRATERRESTRIALS. I’m glad I finally wrote a complete one. I mean, I do have a completed script (that nothing will happen with) and there’s also another original story I keep struggling to start that involves aliens (it would work so much better as a comic book but, alas, I am not an artist). When something weird is happening to the characters in a story? Must be aliens. It’s kind of turning into My Thing. I’m okay with that.

\- I don’t know much about journalism. That’s probably pretty damn obvious. I could have done some research or thought back to my terrible days as a writer for my high school paper but I didn’t because I’m a lazy bag of garbage.

\- I borrowed the name of Nuvarin from a website that sells business names and I chose one that hadn’t been bought yet. Hopefully (fingers crossed) it’s still unavailable and I’m not using the name of a now existing company.

\- The city the bulk of the story takes place in is 100% fictional (mostly because that meant I wouldn’t have to look at maps or research street names and all that jazz). Nobody says the city name out loud, though, because I borrowed it from a piece of original fiction about superheroes I’ve been working on and the name is way too comic-book-y compared to the tone of the fic to have it make sense within the actual text. You could argue, then, that this fic takes place in the same universe that superheroes exist in. So have some fun with that idea.

\- I imagined The Leviathan to be this universe’s version of [The New Yorker](http://www.newyorker.com/) (or, at least, somewhat similar). I even designed a bunch of fake covers for it (which look GREAT) but all the art was found on Tumblr and I don’t want to get in trouble for it.

\- Those That Know Magazine? Not a real magazine. The article names I listed, on the other hand, are totally real. I got them from [here](http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/).

\- Finding the right kind of music to listen to while writing is a big deal for me. As mentioned, I listened to a bunch of mixes I found on 8tracks while I worked but, at the same time, I was building a separate playlist specifically for this fic. I considered posting it but it currently stands at 54 songs long, all of which I borrowed from either a mix of my own (that I already posted last october) or from the other mixes I listened to. That being said, if you want a condensed version to get an idea of what was playing while I wrote and, more specifically, the songs from that playlist I made that I associate the most with this particular story, here are some tunes you should check out:

[“rubicon theme”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ3iGeC_vvQ)  
[“morning” by alva noto + ryuichi sakamoto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM6WLRe8wac)  
[“messy hearts” by moon ate the dark](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEmGUrVRoG4)  
[“new beginning (tidal darkness)” by deaf center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb807hpn854)  
[“lonely void” by mica levi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd7Jkaf_0VA)  
[“judge and jury” by audio machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ep6RJ3OQ3E)  
[“the space in between (instrumental)” by how to destroy angels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIwjhTbpnv0)  
[“through the roof of your mouth” by ben frost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZfpqOcAA7U)  
[“the cold part” by modest mouse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIgXWQUY-sw)  
[“the believers” by how to destroy angels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPnFnobccfI)  
[“escape” by johann johannsson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgEfr7QBlA)  
[“quelques mots pleins d’ombre” by esmerine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmb6OhvIz78)  
[“bunsen burner” by cuts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyfmuUm6qgI)  
[“heart-shaped box” by rockabye baby!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69jFMhYNJUQ)  
[“054” by detektivbyrån](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk4KepVIOTw)  
[“the moment you realize you’re going to fall” by black light burns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08S4wclThSY)  
[“azan” by losers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHuDPYuxJk8)  
[“we fade away” by how to destroy angels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLHL8yv9zi4)


End file.
